ESOE Beta 2 Release

So it seems like I only get a chance to write a post lately when we make a release. Thats not my intention with this blog its just the reality of how much work we are doing at the moment on ESOE and our next piece of software thats currently snaking its way through the development process.

So today we have ESOE Beta 2 and the Apache SPEP Alpha 3 code releases, naturally you can get it over at http://esoeproject.org.

Changes in this addition include several bug fixes, updates to the splash screen between services and the ESOE on initial authentication and support for the back/forward button to be used correctly in browsers.

Additional work for the ESOE itself will now focus on rewriting the ESOE Manager tool to take it from something usable by administrators in the short term to a proper management environment for all users.

We intend to release a Beta 3 in the future containing the new ESOE Manager environment and the Apache code as a single package, IIS will be rolled out initially as s standalone Alpha/Beta candidate series and rolled into the core distribution in the future when it makes sense to do so.

Overall the goal of an extremely solid 1.0 release is on track for early 2008. It may interest some of you to know that Beta 2 code is already being used in production by large clients, its certainly 1.0 level code, we'd just prefer to have more of the external pieces together before tagging it as such.

I hope to be able to write some more interesting technical level posts here soon, though first I have to get paper submissions for JavaOne, AusCert and a few others done and dusted.

Posted at 02:14PM Nov 12, 2007 in category General  | 

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ESOE Beta 1 Release

I am extremely pleased to announce the Beta 1 release of the Enterprise
Sign On Engine.

This is a significant milestone with many issues which were raised as a
result of the Alpha releases and testing being resolved and rolled into
this release.

One of the really important new things for Java is that we now natively
build with Sun JVMs for Java 1.4, Java 5 and Java 6 which you'll see
reflected on our downloads page. We've also continued to extend support
for OpenID and Shibboleth.

A small sample of the new features and bug fixes:
* [CORE-13] - Update ESOE config to be stored in externally defined location
* [CORE-19] - Enable ESOE/SPEP combination to speak directly to backend
nodes in load balanced environment
* [CORE-20] - Introduce support for HTTP-Redirect SAML profile
* [CORE-24] - Have ESOE support common domain cookie SAML 2 impl
* [CORE-15] - Empty policy set in AuthorizationProcessorImpl causes
wrong behaviour
* [CORE-21] - Correct assignments to entityID field in metadata
* [CORE-22] - Safari and Konqueror fail to adhere to SSO redirect

We have also extended documentation significantly on the ESOE wiki, I
invite you to take a look around.

For our developers Ivy repositories are now updated to 0.4.0 (Beta 1).

Finally we've created an introductory video for the ESOE which is
narrated and takes you through exactly what the system can do.

As always downloads are available from:
https://esoeproject.org/confluence/display/eu/Downloads

We welcome you feedback on our Users and Developers groups,
http://groups.google.com/group/esoe-dev and
http://groups.google.com/group/esoe-users

Thanks to the core guys on our team you've done amazing work on this release.

Posted at 09:48PM Sep 14, 2007 in category General  | 

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A blurry demo video

So no one would say I could direct a feature film with blurry video like the one I created below but it gets the job done for now.

The video shows off the ESOE combining Google Apps and its true single sign on modes.

You'll see it's using nothing more then a standard IE browser with no added configuration or software and an Active Directory connected workstation. The user can log straight into GMail etc, no password required. Infact this works for all services connected to ESOE, Google apps is just a special and little more "cool" case.

Beta 1 of ESOE is out Friday 14/9.

Posted at 08:59PM Sep 10, 2007 in category General  | 

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Alpha 3, QUESTNet 2007

Just a quick note to let you all know that we rolled Alpha 3 of the Enterprise Sign On Engine on Tuesday evening.

This week I have ben at QUESTNet 2007 which is held in Cairns in Northern Queensland, Australia. I've enjoyed myself while here talking to many people and of course getting to show off ESOE on Wednesday afternoon.

I'll be focusing on some documentation over the next week so keep your eyes on the wiki.

Posted at 07:23PM Jul 12, 2007 in category General  | 

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intient downtime, next release of ESOE

So we had a little downtime on some of our hosted tools today due to an upgrade of a couple of pieces of software including our blogging engine. All went well and we've been nice and stable since. If your having any problems drop our support group a quick note, they'll get onto it.

So ESOE wise we're preparing the 0.2 release at the moment, lots of new stuff to discuss which I will blog about next week when we let it go. It was planned to send it out today but with the requirement to update software on the core server and some additional work being undertaken for 0.2 we've decided to hold it back until Tuesday. However all the best pieces are already in the SVN development branch so if your super keen you can jump ahead of the pack :).

We've been discussing some plans internally for the future and along with a project being led by Paul Stepowski we're going to start building a very nice piece of complimentary technology for the ESOE, which we believe will help take this concept of federated services even further, stay tuned.

Its also probably well known that we don't use Maven. We have our reasons after evaluating it thoroughly, though we won't go to far into why because its still a project thats got much appeal for many developers. Having said that we are going to formalize the way we do Java / C++ development into a set of processes that others can follow because I am getting more and more requests for this. We intend to make this open a s well just like everything else we do. If the need is there we'll even offer some consultancy type stuff around it in the future, we'd certainly like to think our experience can help others to build great software solutions (open or closed). Drop me a note if you'd like to register some preliminary interest in that for your development team.

Posted at 01:29AM Jun 16, 2007 in category General  | 

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Back to Australia

So I've been back from the US about 48 hours now, I think about 40 of those hours however I have been asleep, plane trips really muck around with my body clock.

I learned a lot on this trip and met a lot of great people. Everyone I met in the US was extremely friendly and welcoming which made things a lot easier. I would like to thank everyone I dealt with at JavaOne, IIW, Google and Stanford you've all taught me a lot.

It seems the ESOE has been starting to make its way around various groups with downloads increasing daily now, I would like to continue to invite you all to join the users and developers groups as approproiate. For our part we're back hard at work on the Apache and IIS integration code and we hope to have this available by mid June. The base C++ SAML 2 code should be available later today in the development ESOE branch.

I'll make a post and subsequent wiki entry in the next few days about how we manage our SVN, its different from what I consider the "mess" of other uses in that we always keep our trunk buildable and have a development branch, slight difference that folks just need to be aware of.

Issue tracking for ESOE is now live and you'll see Fisheye and other technologies coming online in the next few days. We'd like to thanks Atlassian and Cenqua for licensing this technology to our projects as part of their OSS strategies.

Posted at 08:00PM May 21, 2007 in category General  | 

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IIW 2007

So IIW 2007 wrapped up yesterday and I had a great time speaking with many people in the User Centric identity space, something which I think with much caution we can successfully use in the enterprise space, which is one reason the ESOE supports openID.

Lots and lots of presentations on OpenID many of which I didn't attend due to my interest in other presentations that conflicted but it seems like most folks where around to get upto speed on what OpenID offers.

Some very interesting presentations from Higgins and XRI guys. I see some interesting parallels between what the higgins guys are trying to do and what we've done with the ESOE also some opportunity for us to leverage their Java implementations directly in the ESOE so thats very nice. In fact I've agreed to do exactly that with some of their attribute transfer technology in a few months time, the complimentary eclipse/apache licensing also helps out here.

Thanks to everyone at IIW was nice to meet so many of you.

Posted at 07:00PM May 16, 2007 in category General  | 

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JavaOne is done, time for IIW

So JavaOne closed up on Friday night, a truly great 4 days, if your in Java development I highly recommend you get involved next year, the dates are out already for next year, May 6 - 9 so mark your diaries.

Yesterday I went for a tour to Alcatraz and got to do some tours with the US NPS guides who had so much informative background details on the island from 1847 till now, truly great stuff. Some of the secret tunnels they showed us were great. Later on I took the Alcatraz audio tour, where you walk around the prison with headphones and previous prisoners and guards narrate. I can only imagine how it would have been to be in this place, cold, dingy, dark and small are only some of the words that get conjured up when I think back on my few short hours there. I recommend this to anyone traveling t San Francisco. Don't get caught http://www.alcatrazcruises.com/ are the only company that can actually take you right onto the island itself the others just cruise around it.

I've just got off a 1 hour train ride from San Fran to Mountain View, bringing 40kg of luggage, multiple bags and my new toy (more later) was a real pain.

This week will be even more interesting I think with the internet identity workshop, really looking forward to seeing what these folks in the user centric arena are doing.

Mountain View is beautiful and more importantly WARM :).

Posted at 06:29PM May 13, 2007 in category General  | 

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Update from JavaOne

So the past day and a half has seen numerous wireless problems for me here at the conference, abut 4pm yesterday everything came good with the network which is great.

Lots of interesting stuff to blog about but perhaps the most interesting is that Interface21 the company behind the open source spring framework announced yesterday that have accepted USD 10mil in round A venture capita funding, this is after running the company profitably of course, but spring is growing so fast that they need more folks to help them kee expanding rapidly. Good news for an OSS based company and congratulations to them.

Other interesting notes on Spring:
* New ability to work with OSGI using the same kinds of paradigms that we all love about spring, I've previously looked at OSGI for the ESOE but we would have had to do a lot of heavy lifting which at the time we didn't have the resources to complete so this pleases me no end. Haven't heard of OSGI? Check out http://www.springframework.org/osgi and http://www.osgi.org I have grand hopes it will save us all from class dependency hell, especially important in projects like the ESOE for example which relies on many sub OSS projects.
* The spring branding is to be further promoted, acegi security for spring for example will now simply be sping security
* Spring 2.1 is due at any tick of the clock
* A new product called spring batch should hit M1 soon, the name kind of gives it away, useful framework for assisting in batch processing tasks. (Before someone asks the answer is yes to "Will you guys be able to use this?", you'll need to stay tuned for how).

More to come during the day, we are sitting back in the Moscone center on Friday morning for the Keynote from James Gosling or what he calls "cool java toys", there are a bunch of tribal like dummers on stage, great entertainment. The party last night was amazing, more on that later.

Posted at 10:32AM May 11, 2007 in category General  | 

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JavaOne: Java Open Source Projects Panel - Sausage Making Session

Projects represented: Jeronimo, OpenOffice, Google Open Source, Eclipse Foundation

Different models for OSS but its mainly about community, "if they come you will build it".

To make a successful project need to ensure that people feel welcome to join. OSS projects that tend o be developed by a single company tend to e very closed of and its hard for others to get involved, this must be avoided.

Also need to ensure that users feel like they an submit feedback and bugs and that this feedback will be listened to and acted on.

Some large companies are still very closed off about OSS, need to convince them of the value proposition that community around OSS projects brings.

Lots of other interesting stuff and questions that were really to obscure to note down in any meaningful way.

Posted at 04:10PM May 09, 2007 in category General  | 

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