Tech Life of Recht

Tomorrow, we’re co-hosting a workshop on OIOSAML together with NITA. Two hands-on sessions have been planned where people can come and get their hands dirty with the Java and .NET implementations. I’ve prepared a 15GB VMWare image with everything on it, so hopefully, it will work out somewhat nicely.

However, I’m not quite sure it will. It took me close to 3 days to configure the image, and while it may say something about my skills, I believe it says more about how complex security and webservices are. I’ve been working hard on this for over a year now, and I still have problems if I stray from the quite narrow path which I know. I wouldn’t want to be someone who is thrown into this, probably with the words “you just need to download a couple of packages, and then you’re up and running).

The worst part is that once again I can feel the vicious WS-pull – I’m getting more and more involved in this stuff, but there’s no exit route. And I believe I’ve actually thought “SOAP isn’t all that bad” a couple of times – although that was in comparison with the full-fledged WS-Security/SAML 2.0/WS-Trust stack. Still… it can’t be a good sign.

On the positive side, it looks like we’ve succeeded in making OIOSAML.Java somewhat usable, also for those not deeply familiar with SAML. On top of that, we just launched medicin-it.dk last week, which actually uses OIOSAML.Java in pristine form. That’s the first time in a very long time that I’ve had a system in production.

Just in case anybody should be interested (and able to read Danish), here’s the recipe for setting up the VMWare image.