A note of praise for the developers

[Wessel, Keith]

All,

After my upgrade experience to IdP v4, I felt the need to send a note out to the community to publicly praise the developers. This upgrade from IdP v3 to v4 was truly the easiest major software upgrade I've ever seen for any commercial or opensource software! I know the goal was to make the upgrade path easier going forward, and the developers definitely succeeded at that goal. Where my V2 to V3 upgrade took me a couple of months, my v3 to v4 upgrade took me a couple of minutes... literally. Granted, I was already on IdP 3.4.6 and a modern Jetty 9 release, but even if I hadn't been, it still would have been amazingly straightforward and painless.

My only suggestion is to draw out the need for Java 11 on the upgrade page. I had forgotten about that requirement when I went to upgrade until the install script gave me errors. I then double checked the system requirements page and found the Java specifications. Calling that out on the upgrade page would be a nice addition.

This was all for my server-based upgrade of the IdP. My containerized upgrade was just as easy: adjusted my base image version tag, changed the URL and filename of the OIDC extension, and added a single line per the upgrade instructions to my idp-oidc.properties file.

For the developers: amazing work, thank you! And for anyone who's hesitating to upgrade: what are you waiting for?

Keith