OpenSAML user discussion

["Scott Cantor" <>]

> We have defined an extension to SAML 1.1, and we need an SAML java  
> library that easily can be extended. Is openSAML made to be easily  
> extended to work with SAML extensions? By extending I mean that we  
> want to create a library using and extending opensaml, without  
> touching the opensaml code...
> 
> I have not looked to much at opensaml yet, but it seems to be  
> somewhat tricky to extend.

It depends on what you're extending. If it's a part of the spec that's
explicitly designed to be extended, it's quite simple to do with OpenSAML,
but there isn't any support for configuration-time extension. You have to
register factories at runtime, so it pushes the burden of
configuring/loading such extensions out to the application.

However, OpenSAML is currently class-based and requires that you derive from
its classes and use a compatible approach to DOM management. This isn't
really avoidable in general, unless you completely divorce the library from
its XML aspects and just purely marshal/unmarshal, and I don't do that.

-- Scott