Thursday, February 7, 2008

A Great Higgins F2F!

Last week, I had an interesting week at the Higgins F2F in Provo, Utah.

Higgins is really starting to evolve in a nice way to be not only an excellent identity selector, but also an open source implementation of a multi-protocol Identity Provider.

Higgins also has an growing role as an incredibly useful code library for both applications developers and Identity service provider developers. This latter part is why I found myself flying out to Provo in the middle of winter to meet at the Higgins F2F.

As many of you know, I'm currently working on the Attribute Services API for OpenLiberty. At this stage, I'm getting close to publishing the developer APIs that most apps developers will be able to use. But, the plumbing has yet to be built. Higgins IdAS looks like it will fill those requirements nicely!

The challenge will be how to get the IGF privacy metadata properly handled by the Higgins IdAS providers (not to mention how to profile IGF on all of the various protocols). We had a lot of great discussion - and it looks positive that we'll be able to use the existing IdAS APIs to get what we need done.

During the meeting, we shared a lot of requirements and in particular discussed on IGF metadata could be handled by IdAS. The discussion was incredibly useful, and I'm excited to now begin the process of literally pluggins these two projects together!

Another interesting discussion was the topic of access control. XACML is an evolving possibility. It is certainly something we've been looking at for IGF since AAPML is based on a profile of XACML.

My thanks to Novell, Paul, and Mary for hosting and organizing the event, and especially to Jim, who took a bunch of us intrepid geeks out to the mountains on Friday to go skiing. It was nice to spend the day building friendships and solidifying our open source "community" relationship. The knee-deep fluffy white powder snow was definitely a truly epic bonus!

Thanks Jim!

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