Day: June 10, 2006

Andre Durand of Ping Identity has told me about what he'll be demonstating at Catalyst 2006 – important stuff.  As the post at the right puts it:

A user authenticates to a healthcare portal leveraging a self-asserted InfoCard. The user’s credentials are validated by a Java InfoCard Server built by Ping Identity. PingFederate is then used to enable federated single sign-on to a remote Web site without a redundant user authentication.

I've spent a lot of time over the last year trying to convince colleagues across the industry that InfoCard technology is not positioned against Liberty or SAML or WS-Federation technology – that federation protocols could be used on portals powered by WS-Trust through InfoCards. 

Now Ping has an implementation that actually proves it.  I guess this means I can take a break, cool my jets, lay low, and chill.  Thanks Andre.

Under the covers, the integration can be done in a number of different ways, so I look forward to seeing the details of how Ping has approached it.  To download the Ping poster and see the details, click here.

I'm impressed by Ping's ability to continue to innovate in the identity world.

This is a note to those (over 100 testers now) who are using my site to sanity-check their infocard implementations. 

For those who missed the first ten minutes of the movie, one of my motivations when I set up this site was to break down the industry fault lines that were undermining the emergence of an identity metasystem reaching across all platforms and technologies.  So I set out to learn more about the concerns and successes of people running on platforms other than the one I work on.  This led me first to Radio Userland, and then to WordPress, which itself runs on top of MySql, PHP and Linux or other Unix derivatives.  My blog runs in in this environment.

As the conversation evolved I wanted to prove that the Identity Metasystem and InfoCards can, with a bit of work, reach across any technology – and does not involve rocket science.  I wanted my friends in the REST community to see how straightforward all of this was.  So I wrote a library for accepting InfoCards in PHP and made it available to anyone who might find it useful by posting it on my site.

Recently I've enhanced this code to solve a problem that emerged in interoperability testing.  I don't think I broke anything else, but, hey!, I have no test organization, eh?  So this is a notice for everyone with an implementation to retest before turning up at a public demo and finding out I've changed spmething!  Help me make sure I haven't introduced an error that breaks your work.

Once I've gone through this phase I'll replace the code currently on my site with the new verson.