OpenSAML user discussion

[Chad La Joie <>]

Tim Freeman wrote:
> I'm also curious about this bullet from the original email of this thread: 
>
> "Support for loading multiple configuration files was added" 
>
> 1.  Does this mean that multiple configurations can be used simultaneously by
> different threads in the same JVM?  Or is there a choice made at JVM init?

No, it means you can load multiple configurations files and have them 
composed within the singleton configuration object.  The configuration 
files for the SAML2 stuff can be quite large and being able to break 
them up makes them much more manageable.  Even if you never touch the 
really big ones (which you shouldn't have to in most cases) it'll still 
be easier for me to manage.  :)

> 2.  Are all library configurations going to also be available for programmatic
> configuration?  (in Java 1.1, I think I remember the config files mapped to
> System properties). 

Yes.

> 3.  And speaking to both questions: if possible, a model that lets at least
> separate classloaders have different configs would be desirable (i.e., avoid
> System properties).

This could be done in a couple of ways depending on how your classloader 
structure is set up.  Probably the easiest, and I should probably write 
some code to just do this, would be to have multiple configuration 
objects and load the different configuration sets into them.  In this 
model, you, the developer, would need to keep track of those objects 
(maybe binding them to a JNDI tree for example).

The second, more complicated (in some cases) would be to set up your 
classloaders with hard boundaries between them so that the current 
singleton based configuration object could be created multiple times and 
loaded with different configuration sets.  This is easy if you're 
deploying in a web app container and want each separate webapp to have a 
single config.  It's hard if you want to do this in what would normally 
be a single classloader, parent-first delegation, hierarchy.

--
Chad La Joie             2052-C Harris Bldg
OIS-Middleware           202.687.0124