Shibboleth Developers

["Howard Gilbert" <>]

Let me take my usual iconoclastic role and bring up something entirely
different. 

Both the existing SP plugin mechanism and any proposed IdP plugin mechanism
are based on technologies that predate current best practices. Today any
design that proposes to do the same thing would be based on one of the
Dependency Injection or IOC containers. The most powerful is Spring, while a
smaller mainstream alternative is provided by Apache Hivemind.

The bad news is that this introduces a new component and syntax to do some
things we are already doing. The good news is that we are not doing it quite
as thoroughly and professionally as any of the standard containers.

The disadvantage of new external technology is made up by the fact that such
technology has been designed, tested, and documented to perform this one
particular function rather than added as an afterthought to a package
designed to do something else. I have long considered just dropping Spring
into the SP to have it available if someone wanted to use it, and the SP
already contains points where it can be used, but it would be disruptive
unless there was general agreement first.