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Future of the WAYF discussion


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  • From: Chad La Joie <>
  • To:
  • Subject: Future of the WAYF discussion
  • Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2005 18:36:07 -0400
  • Organization: UIS - Project Sentinel

The Shibboleth development team recognizes that a clear direction on the existing WAYF code is needed, whether it's to discontinue development, continue development of a standalone WAYF component, or integrate the WAYF functionality into the SP.

So, let me share my current thoughts on this issue as a way to hopefully spark discussion. I'd like to see the Shibboleth team officially develop and maintain WAYF functionality that can be deployed as either a standalone component (probably run by the federation), and integrated with the SP.

The standalone component mode would work as it currently does. This mode would be easier to support and document as the users would have a consistent UI for choosing their home organization. Federations would be able to brand it accordingly, which helps them get their name out. I also think that the use of the _saml_idp cookie could alleviate a lot of the burden of having to sort through a possibly long list of IdPs by allowing recently used ones to be displayed first in the list. I also think that it needs to easier to change the look and feel of the WAYF UI; the current code wasn't designed for extensive UI changes, as it was just to server as a prototype.

The SP integrated WAYF could be used when the federation did not wish to run a WAYF or if the SP belongs to such a number of federation that providing links to each federation's WAYFs becomes unsupportable. The SP would determine that number but I argue that the number is anything greater than 1. An integrated WAYF could also take advantage of being that close to the SP and filter the list of all possible IdPs to just the list the SP allows information from. This would greatly reduce the number of IdPs listed and the same _saml_idp cookie sorting mechanism mentioned above could be used to further help users choose the right IdP quickly.

Regardless of whether the WAYF functionality is integrated in to the SP or remains standalone, I think that the multi-federation support being worked on by the SDSS folks needs to be incorporated (I'll leave it to them to describe this, if they want).

So please, if you have thoughts and comments on this subject, please let us know.
--
Chad La Joie 315Q St. Mary's Hall
Project Sentinel 202.687.0124



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