JUFS 2009

On 2nd of July this years’ Java User Forum Stuttgart took place at the conference center of the Liederhalle in Stuttgart, as usual organized by the Java User Group Stuttgart (JUGS). As any year, I joined together with some collegues from blue elephant systems GmbH: Georgios, Max, Stefan and Florian. All of us found that the sessions did not quite reach the level of the previous years, maybe because there were merely no gurus or experts from abroad participating in the event. Most presenters were mostly german or local consultants. This domination by consulting companies was also obvious in the exhibition floor, apart from one or two tool vendors already known from previous years.

Apart from a refresher on REST, Spring 3.0 and Eclipse 4 I found especially interesting a presentation os open-source single-sign-on solutions (SSO), especially CAS (and OpenSSO). Talking with some consultants at the end provided some interesting insight. I was especially eager to understand how to support single-sign-on solution in MIDAS in order to allow users logged-into other tools already (e.g. the HP OMU Java UI) to avoid a re-login into the MIDAS GUI given proper credentials. It looks like it does not make sense to integrate such a tool directly but rather be able to validate a SAML(2) token given by such a tool in order to accept a authentication. The only problem is of course that there is no standard backend for a ESB request-based authentication as MIDAS implements it (instead of web-container based authentication that obviously only works for web applications). We in MIDAS need to support also API and CLI clients of all sorts and not only web clients and thus cannot apply such simple scheme. Also there is no standard protocol or API between a PEP and the SSO server such that we could easily use a CAS for authentication itself.

Well so a, though not optimal, but still work-free and interesting day, meeting old HP-collegues etc. and finally with a very cute piano playerin in the evening.