Shibboleth Developers

[Chad La Joie <>]

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