Beauty of standards

As part of the XACML Interoperability preparations, I wrote client code that uses SAAJ 1.3 to build a soap message and send it across to any endpoint that supports scenario 1 of the interoperability process. I basically pass an endpoint url to this set of program code and I get a soap response from the end point, which when processed yield a xacml decision.

Basically, I was able to call the end-points of BEA,IBM, JBoss/RedHat,Oracle, Securent and Jericho Systems with the same piece of client code and the same SOAP request (which internally contains the XACMLAuthDecisionQuery Node) and get a PERMIT decision, irrespective of the implementation details of the XACML implementation at each of these endpoints.

I would like to salute standards that make interoperability a reality. The same salute goes to the faucet makers, who follow standards and who came to my rescue when the hand sprayer from the kitchen tap at my house snapped. All I had to do was, go to Home Depot and buy a generic one.

First roundtrip interoperability tested for XACML Interoperability

I am a voting member on the Oasis XACML Technical Committee representing JBoss/Red Hat. I am also leading Red Hat's participation at the XACML Interoperability event scheduled at the Burton Catalyst Conference at the end of June in San Francisco.

The last few days, the various vendors participating at the interop event have been discussing scenarios to test such that we maintain interest among the attendees as well as not make them so complex that the first ever interoperability event for XACML fails.

Given this, Jericho systems put their endpoint out for others to test. So the honor of being the first vendor ever to publicly place an endpoint for interoperability goes to Jericho systems.

I was able to test the public endpoint. So this makes me a participator in the first ever round trip interoperability exercise for XACML.

The SAML based XACML response received from Jericho endpoint has been framed for eternity here (an idea by Rich Levinson from Oracle Corp).
First SOAP Response

The honor of framing was mine and there goes my 2 minutes of fame. The rest of the fame will come when I put our endpoints out and other vendors are able to access.

Sun OpenDS CheatSheet

Neil Wilson's cheat sheet to integrate OpenDS as a testing ldap engine in your java apps.

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- Make sure that all of the OpenDS JAR files are in your application's
classpath.

- When you're ready to start the server, you can do so as follows:

String configClass = "org.opends.server.extensions.ConfigFileHandler";
String configFile = "config/config.ldif";

DirectoryServer directoryServer = DirectoryServer.getInstance();
directoryServer.bootstrapServer();
directoryServer.initializeConfiguration(configClass, configFile);
directoryServer.startServer();


This will start the server inside the same JVM, and you should be able
to communicate with it using LDAP or using the internal operations API
that we have defined for plugins (via the classes in the
org.opends.server.protocols.internal package).
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