Sun Releases Open Source XACML Language

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."

Comments

How?

[JanusFury]

How can a language be open source? A language doesn't need source; it's a syntax. Compilers need source, not languages. 'Open Source Language' sounds like more hype to me. I may be stupid, but I don't know of any truly open source implementations of the Java that this 'Open Source Language' is in (Last I checked, Sun had a pretty strict licensing scheme going for Java implementations)

I'd hardley say useless

[Anonymous Coward]

there are real reasons why this new markup language is needed. It is intended for complex distributed processes that cross several application domains. the common example is a travel agent, who needs to book travel plans for a customer. The booking includes, flights, trains, cars, hotels and motels. Given the complexity of booking that many items in one single transaction across multiple booking systems, you need a common authentication mechanism. What would you prefer? Everyone write their own authen scheme, which may be secure, but will take a couple months to implement. Multiply by the number of companies the travel agent connects to book reservations.

there are those who disagree, but those whose jobs require complexity, it is a step towards easier integration. Microsoft should just go with the architecture Oasis has laid out for ebXML and dump their piece of junk which originally had no concept of coreography.

"Open source" reference implementation

[yerricde]

How can a language be open source?

I consider a language to be "open source" if it has a reference implementation available to the public as OSI Certified(TM) open source software.

Re:What idiots

[angel'o'sphere]

Does it ever occur to Sun that Java is not the answer to all problems? That maybe, just maybe, an implementation in C would be more generally useful as a reference implementation?


I know more Java programmers than C programmers .... and all C programmers I know program Java now.

All industry software projects I'm involved in are in ... ah forgett it you wont belive it anyway ...

HINT: its not C and its not C++.

angel'o'sphere

Re:What idiots

[binaryDigit]

Does it ever occur to Sun that Java is not the answer to all problems

Did it occur to you that Sun would write the code to match whatever use fits THEM the best. The fact that they then turn around and make the code OS is a gesture on their part. Did you think they sat around and said "hey, lets write an implementation of this for the masses"? Nope, their needs came first, as it should be.

Unfortunately not everyone "gets it"

[binaryDigit]

The requirement of having robust access control (beyond simple enter your name and password) is not very common outside the corp. world. So those who've not had to deal in that code would not fully understand how big of a deal that this markup language CAN be (assuming it's adopted, robust, etc, etc). This is definitely one of those areas where "everybody rolls their own", or worse, they dumb down their access control to fit things like directory services and the ilk, that were never intended to do what this is trying to.

Funny how in many posts this has degenerated into either "we don't need no more stinkin languages" or "Sun/Java sucks, yadda, yadda".

Re:Unfortunately not everyone "gets it"

[afidel]

Oh this is SO true, for instance my last employer was GE, within GE there are probably at least 100 different authentication domains (this is being conservative, there are probably several hundred) in the last couple of years they have tried to unite a large % of these under an SSO policy, only problem is to even get your SSO information you might have to travel across 3-4 domains. For instance to get mine I had to get inside the firewall with a vpn client, acess a controlled page with a DES access card, then provide my NT credentials to get access to my webmail which lead me through a link to a peoplesoft application with it's own access controlls so that I could sign up for SSO. Providing a single set of credentials and having all of the services recognize me would have made life much easier. Of course a good counterpoint is that anyone who was able to spoof my credentials would then have acess to all of those resources, but this was generally true of the cumbersome system, as long as you had access to the email password you could retrieve/reset most of the others.