Modular Installation in the IdP

[Cantor, Scott]

On 4/22/20, 11:00 AM, "dev on behalf of Cris Rockwell" <dev-bounces at shibboleth.net on behalf of cmrockwe at umich.edu> wrote:

> An OSGi version of the OpenSAML modules could achieve the same effect.

The OpenSAML modules (and they're Maven modules for arbitary code organization reasons, to be clear, not Java modules)  are not the plugins we're talking about.

The IdP is based on Spring and Spring Web Flow and plugins to the IdP have to supply configuration and bean files, along with jars, into a variety of Spring contexts throughout the existing architecture including new webflows, which we don't control the Spring context management for.

There is no isolation of classes to specific plugins possible with the current design and that's not a goal.

If we were starting from scratch, OSGI might be a consideration, but it's too late for that. It may be suitable to some use cases we hit that don't involve flows, but the need for a plugin management approach and securing the installation and upgrade process would be a need either way and could accommodate that.

-- Scott