Shibboleth Developers

I recently saw this entry on Jon Udell's blog, describing how gmail 
has been programmed.... I was wondering whether anyone has any 
experience with this approach, and whether it might be at all 
relevant to the proposed SHARPE GUI for maintaining ARPs?

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/10/26.html#a1102

> Under Gmail's hood
>
> I'd been experimenting for a few months with Gmail, Google's Web 
> mail system, without really taking it seriously. But this week I 
> decided to take the plunge and try using Gmail not only as a mail 
> search engine, but as a replacement for Outlook (on Windows) and 
> Mail (on OS X). Now I'm ready to join the chorus singing the praises 
> of GMail's user-interface technology. Its combination of HTML, 
> JavaScript, and the DOM makes the browser do some remarkable tricks. 
> ... As early adopters discovered long before I did, there's an 
> architecture behind this JavaScript/DHTML wizardry. The best 
> description I've found is from Johnvey Hwang, who deconstructed 
> Gmail's JavaScript code and created a .Net-based Gmail API. As Hwang 
> described in his July 5 write-up, Gmail loads a JavaScript UI engine 
> into your browser at the beginning of each session. Oddpost, he 
> noted, was the first Web mail application to perfect this technique. 
> That was a prophetic statement: Just four days later, on July 9, 
> Yahoo acquired Oddpost.  Because Gmail's behavior is embedded in the 
> UI engine, all subsequent interaction between the browser and the 
> Gmail service is just an exchange of data. What Hwang calls the 
> DataPack format is not XML, though; it's JavaScript. When you make a 
> request to the Gmail service, whether to refresh your inbox or to 
> modify the list of labels you can attach to messages, the response 
> is a minimal set of JavaScript function calls and associated data 
> objects that the engine uses to update the display. ... So is Gmail 
> a rich Internet application? Sure. Although that label most often 
> applies to Java, .Net, and Flash clients, Gmail shows that Web 
> clients can join the club too. But crucially, Gmail's architecture 
> is open to other kinds of rich clients, too. It doesn't have to be a 
> zero-sum game. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]