Some thoughts about Shibboleth (from a deployer point of view)

[Peter Schober]

* Cantor, Scott <cantor.2 at osu.edu> [2016-04-10 20:01]:
> > In the 3.x track, I’ve seen some “*.properties” files emerge with key
> > value syntax that let you configure some aspects of the software (without
> > even knowing that those are fed to beans). Is it something that will be
> > generalized for other aspects of the configuration (metadata sources,
> > attribute resolving/filtering etc) ?
> 
> Personally I don't think so. Using properties to configure anything
> that's fundamentally hierarchical (like the resolver) or contains a
> sequence of things like metadata or filter rules is brutal (and I
> actually don't think even possible to express in the Spring
> files). I don't think it's an improvement, personally. If there were
> one metadata source, then sure, it would be easy. But that isn't
> generally true.

Maybe YAML fits fit that profile. Has the benefits of being easily
readable and writable (like property files), plus YAML documents are
stuctured (like XML).
pyFF (and Ansible, to some degree) has shown how you can do powerful
things with very simple YAML documents as configuration.

Of course like anything else that still has the other two problems
mentioned:
1. The building and maintenance of the config abstraction layer itself
2. The difference/overlap between the config abstraction layer and the
   Spring XML.

-peter