Shibboleth Service Provider V4 Alpha 2 now available

[Scott Cantor]

After a few months of additional work on features, documentation, Hub configuration improvements, and bug fixes, we are pleased to make available the second Alpha release of the forthcoming SP V4, the replacement for the current generation of the SP.

As before, the "home page" of sorts for testing information and links to the software:
https://shibboleth.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DEV/pages/5053906948/SP4+Prelease+Testing

As noted there, there has been a breaking change internally requiring the Hub plugin version compatible with this alpha2 Agent to be advanced to 0.0.2-SNAPSHOT, and a forthcoming update to the Hub plugins will render them incompatible with the original alpha1 Agent.

Major changes of significance:

- The Windows installer for the Agent has been redone as a batch file, and the documentation substantially adjusted to reflect that fact. This is part of our push to remove all uses of MSI from the project. That means this alpha does not update the original alpha release directly, but of course these are alphas anyway.

- User-directed logout is now implemented, both as a general framework in the Agent for both RP- and IdP-initiated protocols, and more specifically with SAML SLO implemented in the Hub now. Some changes to handlers.ini in the Agent have to be made for this in comparison to the original alpha1. OpenID logout in the Hub is under development but should drop in to the Agent as-is.

- A number of changes to the Hub configuration around Agents have happened to better automate and streamline things and make it a bit more plug and play for default behavior. Those have been going on throughout the Spring and don't really affect the Agent at all, but are notable. I will be talking a bit about that during the Members-only webinar next week.

We still have a decent amount of work left, but not really that much on the Agent side, and I expect this to be the final alpha. We may or may not do betas, but quite frankly there has been no testing feedback anyway, and it's not worth the work and cost for us to do prereleases with no feedback so we'll make that call later this year.

I believe Q1 2027 is still the likely shipping window.

-- Scott