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

[Cantor, Scott]

> My point is not CLI vs GUI. It’s for example you can perfectly configure an
> Apache (HTTPD) server without knowning C/C++, or a Jetty server without
> doing Java.

The former is an example of a) a horribly complex configuration language that most people tend to agree doesn't work well and b) a total from-scratch configuration layer (all work we avoided, at least for any new pieces). In particular, the hierachical nature of the config is totally masked by the linear config language, exactly the sort of problem XML helps with.

As to the latter, you don't need to know Java to use Shibboleth, except insofar as we don't have documentation written and are punting to javadocs. You do need to know Java to customize it, and the same goes for Apache (re: C)

-- Scott