09.23.05
Posted in Articles, General Ramblings, J2EE at 10:06 pm by kkj
“An egosurfer is one who surfs the internet for their own name, to see what, if any, articles appear about themselves. The search engine used most is Google, due to their ability to search over 8 billion pages.” (source: WikiPedia).
Have you ever egosurfed? My friend Jens did so quite innocently, just wanting to know how many links our JavaWorld article might have generated, and what odd sites might refer to it. As you will expect he found the usual automatic RSS feeds, mindlessly displaying articles that match certain keywords: Java, J2EE, SOA, Exception Handling - so if you’re reading this post off an RSS feed and fail to see the relevance, that’s why ;-). Generating links to articles requires a skilled Bullshit Bingo player who can really stir the alphabet soup, but thanks to RSS syndicators that’s really all it takes. It appears we play that game reasonably well 
Anyway, Jens came across something he didn’t expect: Someone found the JavaWorld Exception Handling article worthy of translation into simplified chinese, and posted it on the Chinese site www.matrix.org.cn. While I recognize the structure, my name, and the figures we doodled, I have no idea what the article actually says. Overwhelmed by the evidence provided though, I choose to believe that the exception manifesto is now available to another 1/5th of the world population.
What an unexpected finding indeed.
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09.13.05
Posted in Architecture, Presentations, SOA at 11:23 pm by kkj
There was a war in the World. There always is. This time the war was between two Semitic tribes, the Ephramites, and the Gileadites. Leading the Gileadites, Jephthah and his men smote the Ephramites and were victorious. Some Ephramites escaped the battle, and the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan, asking everyone who passed, are you an Ephramite? If they said no, the Gileadites replied, then say Shibboleth! Ephramites would say Sibboleth for they could not pronounce it right. The Gileadites took those Epramites and slew them at the passages of Jordan, and at that time 42.000 men were killed. (Interpretation of the Book of Judges, Chapter 12 verses 1-15).
Today I did a presentation of a pilot project within AmtsrÃ¥dsforeningen, which aims at defining a SOA for the Danish National Healthcare domain. The topic of the conference was security, and so I concentrated on providing a rough outline of the standards and services we see in such a SOA with respect to security. One such standard is the Security Assertion Markup Language v2.0 (SAML), which among other things is based off the Internet2 initiative, Shibboleth from which this article takes its name. A Shibboleth is a way of speaking, which identifies members of a group from non-members. In this case, those who belong to the domain Healthcare from those who don’t.
The pilot project uses the Danish National Digital Signature initiative (OCES) as the basis for providing a single-signon infrastructure with SAML tickets. Once authenticated, a user can gain access to services in the SOA by showing the ticket along with the request for service to some provider. The provider, in turn, can use the ticket to get a profile from the centralized authentication server, which issued the ticket in the first place, and then validate authorization.
The presentation is at a pretty high level, and does not dive into technicalities.
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