Shibboleth Developers

[Chad La Joie <>]

The discovery service is a web service.  It is a service accessible via 
HTTP that takes in input and provides you output based on it's business 
processes.  This is perfectly reasonable as an SOA component.

Maybe you mean you want it to be a SOAP service?

Alistair Young wrote:
> > And I think people should just stop trying to offload discovery and do it
> > in
> > the application where the decision can be made with the most information.
> is that not against the SOA movement these days? Having a big blob of an
> SP, with duplicated functionality in each one, all needing updated to keep
> up with profile changes?
>
> Yes the SP will have most of the information but the DS will have some too
> and the decision will be based on rules that could change all the time.
>
> The discovery service as a service that, given enough information, could
> make a decision on a likely source of identity. e.g. the simplest piece of
> information could be the IP address that the original request came from.
> That would have to be metadata lookup. I wouldn't want an SP to have that
> sort of metadata, to be updated across all SPs. Rather have it in the
> discovery "service". A "web service". An authenticated, authorised web
> service. A brick in the eFramework. It wouldn't need a ui if the SP does
> this next:
>
> If nothing came back from the service then the SP just spews out it's
> metadata for IdPs and says "ok, find it yourself".
>
> I think the "find it yourself" bit is what you say SPs should do
> themselves but cutting down on the options based on info a user can
> produce at the time (IP, perhaps resource uri etc.)
>
> A semantic discovery service (SDS) would be an interesting creature.
> Client from 10.192.3.2 wants to access /medicalimages/gore.jpg. hmmm says
> SDS, I know that that IP block has several IdPs and that one of them is in
> the Faculty of Cutting Things Up. Ontological references equate cutting
> things up with medical images. "That's your best bet" it says to the SP.
> SP says, is this your IdP? If yes, SP can communicate back to SDS saying
> "well done" and SDS learns...
>
> Alistair

--
Chad La Joie             2052-C Harris Bldg
OIS-Middleware           202.687.0124