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Sun Releases Open Source XACML Language

Posted by Hemos on from the building-the-tools dept.

LowneWulf writes "An InternetNews.com article mentions that the OASIS standards group today ratified the Extensible Access Control Markup Language 1.0 specification. But even better, Sun Microsystems Labs has backed this up with an open-source version in Java on Sourceforge."

3 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What idiots by jilles · · Score: 4, Informative

    Hey, it's just a prototype/demo application that conforms to the standard. If you don't like it write your own in your favorite language (and feel free to borrow as much as you like from the source code).

    Besides, this kind of thing would typically be used in a web application environment, where C typically is not the language of choice (mostly because core dumps are not acceptable in a server environment). And guess what, sun happens to produce some of the most popular tools and techniques for web applications (mostly Java based).

    --

    Jilles
  2. RTFP people by f00zbll · · Score: 5, Informative
    For those who are too damn lazy to read what the language does and why Sun wrote a reference implementation.

    * One standard access control policy language can replace dozens of application-specific languages

    * Administrators save time and money because they don't need to rewrite their policies in many different languages

    * Developers save time and money because they don't have to invent new policy languages and write code to support them; they can reuse existing code

    * Good tools for writing and managing XACML policies will be developed, since they can be used with many applications

    * XACML is flexible enough to accommodate most access control policy needs and extensible so that new requirements can be supported

    * One XACML policy can cover many resources; this helps avoid inconsistent policies on different resources

    * XACML allows one policy to refer to another; this is important for large organizations, for instance, a site-specific policy may refer to a company-wide policy and a country-specific policy.

    Before someone else rants about copy protection, find out what it is before you start typing. I'm guitly of it in the past, but this is a useful language will real benefits.

  3. Re:Got really excited by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Most of the source code to the Java language is available. The only thing lacking is the VM. Before anyone says that the VM is java, a majority of the language is implemented IN java and is freely available.