Java and Open Source

Sun have announced that their Sun Java System Portal Server (jsr168) system, is to be released as open source. They've already released some of the more minor components, a few portlets.

I'd like to put this down to high ideals on the part of Sun, but I find it hard. They've seen that the portal market is being consolidated by merges, both planned and in progress and they don't want to be left out in the cold. By open sourcing their portal server they place themselves to merge with the other contenders and greatly reduce the cost of supporting and maintaining the software going forward.

This 30 minute recording with Alfred Essa, Executive Director of the .LRN Consortium, gathers his thoughts on open source, blogs, podcasts, java, .LRN and a range of other topics.

The OSS Watch Building Open Source Communities conference seemed to go pretty well yesterday. We had a broad range of people, with a broad range of interests and everyone seem to find something useful.

I had a great day, catching up with old friends and new, including: Gustav Delius University of York; Jim Farmer, Sakai Educational Partnership Program; Sean Keogh, OXILP; Bill Olivier, Development Director (Systems and Technology) JISC; Andrew Savory and Helen Sharp, Open University.

OpenOffice has announced their up coming conference in Slovenia.

On a related not I've been playing with todays build of what will become the 2.x series. Very nice, but rather on the large side.

Sun is talking about "open-sourcing K-12 educational materials" at their JavaOne bash, but they're rather sort on actual details. Apparently missing are an economic model (who is going to create the resources and who is going to pay them to) and a licence under which they're going to be released.

Global Education Learning Community website

news.com.com coverage

The local Bodington folks seem to be promoting Guan Xi a third-party, Open Source implementation of the Shibboleth standard.

I'm sure it is great software, but it appears to lack a comprehensive list of differences between it and the Shibboleth reference implementation. It is written in Java rather than C and appears to handle non-ASCII names, but other than that it's a bit of a mystery...

Coverage on Adam Marshall's Blog.

[Disclaimer: I am currently wearing a Guan Xi t-shirt]

Further to my previous post, I've just recieved this email from Alistair Young:

From: Alistair Young
Subject: Re: free gift in your pigeon holes
Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 13:47:40 +0100

Hi folks,

The Guanxi IdP is written in Java, as is the Shibboleth one. The only C++ implementation is the Shibboleth SP.

The Guanx IdP makes life a little easier for a user to deploy in that it creates it's own self-signed certificate and puts it in it's own keystore. It also creates a Shibboleth compatible X509 for you to drop into your SP. The Gx IdP also doesn't use DOM3 as there's no requirement to sign SAML Attribute Assertions in the Shibboleth profile (which isn't really a standard, it's just an unofficial SAML Profile). The UNICODE problem is a DOM3 issue, rather than a Shibboleth one. It came up when testing the original Shibboleth IdP in Bodington. You need DOM3 to sign Shibboleth assertions due to the non-standard ID attribute involved but as I said, it's not required.

The Gx IdP It can be run in two modes - standalone or embedded. It runs embedded in the Bodington VLE and takes advantage of the bod environment to turn it into an IdP with no modification to Bodington.

The Guanxi SP, which is due soon, is a Java SP that differs from the Shibboleth one in that the Gx SP is distributed. It's based on web services and uses WS-CallBack to allow the core SAML Engine to be deployed/clustered anywhere on the net, with an army of Guards deployed to protect resources. It uses SAML2 metadata to form trust relationships between the Engine(s) and Guard(s). This lets you deploy a Guanxi Engine farm that takes care of the heavy duty SAML/ Shibboleth traffic, while the Guards just initiate the process and are notified when the attributes are ready.

Lastly, Guanxi also includes SAMUEL - a lightweight SAML1.1 Java toolkit. The Gx IdP and SP both use this. SAMUEL differs from openSAML in that SAMUEL has no Shibboleth functionality. It's a pure SAML1.1 toolkit.

I'll wiki this at some point!

Alistair

I recently attended a meeting of the JISC e-learning programme projects. The projects have been pushed down the open source route by the funders (the JISC), so I was attending to hold an open source surgery to iron out any problems they were having. Only a small number of participants attended the surgery, but all of them bought questions and all of them got answers. Even better, all but one got the answer they wanted. Most of the projects are working with Java and service oriented architectures, so many of the questions revolved around the relationship between Java and open source, which has been getting some press recently.

I attended the project presentations and was pleasantly surprised by both the mean and minimum level of technical competence displayed by those presenting progress so far on their projects. I'm in no position to comment on the e-learning aspects of the projects, of course.

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/programme_elearning.html

I recently had the priviledge of attending the 2005 SD West Expo in Santa Clara, California. For those of you who are development managers, I'd strongly recommend this conference.

There were many talks regarding "agile development" techniques that were new to me. There were discussions on agile project management, agile requirements gathering, and agile development and design. Of particular interest to me was a strong emphasis on using test driven development techniques using products such as JUnit and Assertive.  To an old school programmer such as my self, this was quite a paradigm shift.

The question I'd like to pose here, is wether agile development techniques have been adopted in educational shops or the open source development community in general? Is this a concious choice, or are we just a little behind the game?

XWiki is a WikiWiki clone written in Java. The group maintaining the service has joined the newly created JBoss Open Source Federation, an ititaitve to federate open-source development build around the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System. I'm not real sure what to make of this, but I thought it might be worthwile to relay.