Shibboleth Developers

[Scott Cantor <>]

>   2) Centralize the data caching of sessions, handles, and attributes.
>      Each piece of the Shib architecture has its own requirements for
>      what data needs to be cached, but all of them overlap.
>      Centralizing the storage minimizes the issues of "shared memory"
>      or "threading" or other cross-platform problems that would arrise
>      from other designs.  This design also allows the implementation
>      to replace the storage mechanism without changing the
>      applications and plugins.  ONC-RPC is a small, simple, portable
>      protocol to model an IPC and exists on every platform in
>      existence.

Heh, and I thought I was finally done with RPC. ;-)

I wonder, though, why do you think that all of the other "connectors"
people write these days for these web plugin->service interfaces
(Tomcat's fifteen different connectors, scripting engine connectors like
Cold Fusion's, etc.) never use RPC?

It's a serious question, I'm not really arguing with you. I get the
feeling that most developers really detest RPC for whatever reason
(certainly one reason among many DCE is dead), even in places like this
where it's really helpful.

For one thing, this should make it pretty straightforward to embed the
SHAR and the caching engine inside the web server, by localizing those
RPC calls. The practical fact is that everything most people use today
likes threads well enough (including Apache 2, mercifully), and on
Windows, you don't find web servers running multi-process, so there's a
lot of mgmt and performance overhead to splitting it out that can be
eliminated. I like having the option to split it alot, I just don't like
it mandatory.

>      For flexibily and extensibility, I propose to implement the
>      policy configuration as a scheme plugin.  This allows a simple
>      text-based configuration but also extremely powerful paradigm.

By scheme, do you mean scheme literally? As in the LISP-like language?
Or is that meant to be schema, as in XML or something else?

-- Scott

------------------------------------------------------mace-shib-design-+
For list utilities, archives, subscribe, unsubscribe, etc. please visit the
ListProc web interface at 

    http://archives.internet2.edu/

------------------------------------------------------mace-shib-design--