Alternative Webservers and

[McDermott, Michael]

<pull-pin/>
Hello Devs et al.,

Happy new year.

Last week some peers in the Ruby/Higher Ed community were wondering what
options were available for Shibboleth integration without using Apache.  I
encouraged them to use the Apache Shib implementation if possible, but
pointed them to the Ruby SAML implementation, though I've not used it
myself.

The main concern from the Ruby developers about the Apache implementation
is that it is not infrequent that the developers do not control the
application hosting environment.  I imagine this is a possible scenario for
Python, Javascript (node.js), and certainly Java and the host of JVM
languages (Groovy, Scala, Clojure, JRuby, not sure how widely used Jython
is).

Attendant to that point, I saw this post this morning:
http://www.infoworld.com/t/application-servers/nginx-overtakes-microsoft-no-2-web-server-183079

The headline is a bit sensational when you look at the statistics, but I
take the point that the market share for a third, high performance web
server, is growing to a level where it is probably mainstream.

The two events together lead me to post to the list to put a bug in the dev
lists's ear about how to handle SAML SP integration in a
polyglot/poly-server world.  Outsourcing application hosting is becoming
more and more common.

<lob-grenade/>

I don't have an answer, but it seems the discussion about the Java SP at
https://wiki.shibboleth.net/confluence/display/DEV/JavaSPRoadmap around the
authentication service and attribute service is generic enough that it
could be applied to any implementation.

Thoughts, Anger, Anti-Ruby rants...

Best,
Mike

<duck/>


-- 
Michael J. McDermott
Lead Developer, Identity and Access Management
Brown University
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://shibboleth.net/pipermail/dev/attachments/20120105/a429c241/attachment.html