Marina Sum's Blog

Marina Sum, having been a writer for Sun since 1989 and a staff writer for Sun Developer Network for several years, blogs mostly on Sun-sponsored open-source projects.

Running the OpenSolaris OS From a Browser

Interested in exploring the capabilities of the OpenSolaris OS? A Sun Learning Services beta program makes it really easy: You can run the OS from a browser—with no downloads or installations, for one hour at a time. Brian Leonard's June 18 posting on the OpenSolaris group blog, The Observatory, has the details, complete with screen shots and important tidbits of information from the launch site. Be sure to have the login credentials of your Sun online account ready.

I just tried the steps and everything worked as advertised. Have a whirl yourself?

OpenDS and OpenSSO on FISL's Presentation Agenda in Brazil This Week

This Friday, June 26, architects Ludo Poitou and Pat Patterson of OpenDS and OpenSSO, respectively, will present at FISL [Forum Internacional Software Livre in Portuguese for International Free Software Forum, "South America's biggest open-source conference," according to Pat], to be held in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Ludo will discuss the topic of scaling identity stores with OpenDS; Pat, OpenSSO's approaches of developing open-source identity services.

In addition, on Tuesday, June 23, Pat will lead a session on securing RESTful Web services with OAuth at Javali, also in Porto Alegre. For details, see Ludo's and Pat's postings.

OpenDS 2.0.0 Release Candidate 2 Ships

OpenDS community manager and architect Ludo Poitou has announced the release of OpenDS 2.0.0 Release Candidate 2. Besides bug fixes, the release includes many new capabilities, including enhanced multimaster replication and recurring tasks. OpenDS 2.0 will follow shortly after the testing of RC 2 is complete.

Do let the OpenDS team know your take by writing one of the mailing lists or the #opends IRC. Ludo's posting above contains the details.

Transcript of OpenSolaris Slashdot Chat

Have a look at the transcript of the May 28 OpenSolaris live chat, at which several senior OpenSolaris folks answered questions posted by the attendees. Among the questions are—

• What's the future of Solaris 10?
• How will OpenSolaris and Solaris coexist in the future?
• Can I install OpenSolaris without Gnome?
• What are the virtualization options for OpenSolaris?
• What is Virtual Wire?
• Can I migrate from Solaris 10 to OpenSolaris?
• Will OpenDS replace OpenLDAP in OpenSolaris?

Quite a pool of illuminating Q&As.

Catching Up With OpenDS Community Manager at JavaOne

It’s always a pleasure to visit with Ludo Poitou, community manager and architect for OpenDS, Sun’s open-source project for a next-generation directory service. He’s ever knowledgeable, down-to-earth, candid, and gracious. Yesterday at JavaOne, we caught a few minutes to chat about the latest of OpenDS.

OpenDS 2.0
“OpenDS 2.0 is slated to be shipped in early July. That’s a major, much anticipated release,” Ludo beamed. “Meanwhile, Release Candidate 1 was shipped about two weeks ago, to be followed by Release Candidate 2 sometime next week. We’ve been running tests at a fast pace for weeks, especially on the new capabilities.”

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An Eye-Opening Talk on UI Design

I much enjoyed listening to Ben Galbraith of Mozilla expound on user-interface design at JavaOne yesterday afternoon. Not only is the title, Creating Compelling User Interfaces, eye-catching, the content is well supported by quotations from experts.

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Technical Session on SOA's Deployment Challenges

The presentation by eBay distinguished architect Sastry Malladi at JavaOne on Tuesday afternoon illuminated the benefits, misconceptions, and deployment challenges of service-oriented architecture (SOA). He also described how eBay tackles the issues.

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On Java University at JavaOne

Java University at 2009 JavaOne was held on Sunday afternoon, May 31, and all day Monday, June 1. Earlier today, I caught up with Joe Boulenouar, senior Java specialist at Sun, and asked him how everything went in those 1-1/2 days.

"Wonderfully," Joe beamed. "Impressive signups, enthusiastic students, active participation during class. All extremely gratifying." In particular, he pointed out that the attendees welcomed and appreciated the wide coverage and depth of the courses, which ranged from Java to Java EE to JavaFX, also to SOA to Web 2.0 to Web services to scripting languages, such as JRuby.

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Drizzle Demo App to Watch for at CommunityOne West and JavaOne Next Week

Recently, I caught up with Lee Bieber, a Sun engineering manager in charge of, among other projects, Drizzle, Sun's open-source project for a lightweight, optimized SQL database for cloud and Web applications. He mentioned a demo application being developed by his team to create a highly scalable search engine that retrieves, indexes, and searches for data. The application will be a key demo at the Drizzle and memcached POD at CommunityOne West next Monday, June 1, and at JavaOne later in the week.

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Configuring OpenDS as a User Data Store in OpenSSO

In recently released OpenSSO Express 7 are several impressive capabilities, including support for OpenDS Standard Edition as a repository for user profiles, authentication data, and policies. You need perform only a few configuration steps, as detailed in a procedural article in the OpenSSO Resource Center.

The article also includes several sections of reference information: troubleshooting tips, the OpenSSO features that work with various directory servers, a few policy and interface nuances that might help you determine which user data store to use. Have a look.

Ian Murdock on Operating Systems As They Relate to Developers

In a recent posting, Sun's Ian Murdock shares his take on how operating systems affect application developers' day-to-day tasks. In the case of OpenSolaris, developers would surely welcome the opportunity to take advantage of outstanding capabilities like DTrace and ZFS if they are integrated into the tools for developing applications?

OpenSolaris has won many positive reviews since its inception. My best for its continued success in the times ahead.

Free Sun Webinar on Directory Services on Wednesday, May 20

Sun product line manager Nick Wooler will host a free Webinar next Wednesday, May 20 on cost savings and performance enhancements delivered by directory services. See Nick's posting for more specifics.

To sign up, complete and send in a short registration form. Near the bottom is a note that, by signing up, you'll receive the replay information. Nice touch!

OpenSSO Fedlet Named Best Innovation by European Identity Conference

As pointed out by Sun's Pat Patterson and Daniel Raskin, OpenSSO's Fedlet won the Best Innovation Award at the recently held European Identity Conference. The Fedlet, in Pat's words, is "a lightweight service-provider implementation of SAML [Security Assertion Markup Language] 2.0" that enables federation for both Java and .NET applications. See more details in my March 29 posting.

Pat's posting also includes an interview video, in which he talked about the well-attended OpenSSO Community Day in Munich last week and the impressive contributions of OpenSSO extensions by both Sun and non-Sun folks. He also described the latest OpenSSO capabilities. Sounds like everything is on a roll! Congratulations.

Directory Application for iPhone

In late April, OpenDS community manager Ludo Poitou wrote about the Directory application for his iPhone. The application not only returns search results of corporate directory servers, including Sun Directory Server and OpenDS, but also enables secure email and phone calls to contacts in the iPhone's address book. The configurations, as described in Ludo's posting, are simple to set up.

Note that OpenDS, the Sun-sponsored open-source project for the next-generation directory service, is written entirely in the Java language. In a previous posting, I pointed out Ludo's concise USTREAM presentation on OpenDS. Do take a look.

Highlights of Java University at 2009 JavaOne

As in previous years, Java University is offering 2009 JavaOne Conference Pass and Java U Pass holders an impressive array of classes led by experienced and knowledgeable instructors. The classes, due to start on Sunday, May 31, cover numerous topics, including JavaFX, Java EE 5 and 6 and Java ME platforms, JavaServer Faces technology, SOA, Web 2.0, JRuby and Rails, Groovy and Grails, GlassFish, NetBeans, DTrace, cloud computing, and the zembly Project.

Courtesy of Joe Boulenouar, senior technical specialist at Sun, here's a synopsis of a majority of the classes:

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Visit the OpenSolaris Information Resources Wiki

The OpenSolaris Information Resources wiki well deserves a shout-out. Three major sections at the top link to information for three different audiences: users, system administrators, and developers. You can then drill down and access a valuable pool of references—tips and tricks, tutorials, task lists, forums.

Remember that the site is a wiki, hence open to contributions. Just follow the simple steps on the How to Contribute page.

To the folks behind the scenes, splendid job!

Read Up About LDAP Innovations

Felix Gaehtgens's March article on Kuppinger Cole, Innovations in the World of LDAP, that is, the directory-server arena, is well worth a read. It takes you through the early history of Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition (called iPlanet Directory Server before) in 2002 and its evolvement since, with notable enhancements in scalability, performance, replication, reliability, and resilience. You also learn about the mechanics of password storage and the related data migration between servers.

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How to Federate Google Apps for Single Sign-On With OpenSSO--Fast

Sun's chief identity strategist Daniel Raskin has posted a three-minute video that steps you through the procedure of configuring OpenSSO for single sign-on to Google Apps. Be sure to first download Sun OpenSSO Express 7 and the Google Apps Starter Kit, as pointed out in the posting.

The procedure involves only a few point-and-clicks in the GUI along with some data entries and OpenSSO will generate a certificate for you to upload to Google Apps. The final testing step shows how you simply authenticate—log in—through OpenSSO to access Google Apps. Nice!

A Primer on OpenDS

Interested in what the OpenDS Project is about? Be sure to read the recent interview on DZone with Ludo Poitou, senior staff engineer at Sun and OpenDS community manager. You'll learn about the related standards and specifications, the numerous OpenDS features that serve the enterprise, the background for two directory-server projects at Sun, the database aspect of OpenDS, and other highlights.

Note that Sun OpenDS Standard Edition, which is identical to OpenDS, is available as a commercially supported product from Sun. Also, you can grab OpenDS from the OpenSolaris IPS package repository—easy as pie.

Ludo encourages OpenDS deployers to share their stories. Do participate!

Power Features of OpenSolaris OS

To learn the advanced features of the OpenSolaris OS, such as the ZFS file system, virtualization, and DTrace, turn to a presentation by Sun's Nick Solter and Dave Miner at CommunityOne East in NYC in March. Included are the video and related slides.

Solter and Miner are two of three coauthors of a 1,000-page book called OpenSolaris Bible, which has earned a five-star review rating. "This book is written so well that the knowledge simply jumps from the pages and into your brain," wrote the reviewer. That's high praise indeed.

Third OpenSSO Community Day: San Francisco, Sunday, May 31

OpenSSO community manager and Sun principal engineer Pat Patterson has just announced the third OpenSSO Community Day. It'll be held on Sunday, May 31 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA, between 1:00-7:00 p.m. in an unconference format. Attendance is free. Don't miss this wonderful opportunity to learn about the latest in single sign-on, authentication, LDAP, and other Web security-related topics and to connect with the OpenSSO community members.

The first OpenSSO Community Day, held in New York City on March 17, was very well attended and received many kudos. See my previous posting for a recap.

The second OpenSSO Community Day will take place in Munich on May 5. Stay tuned for the details from Pat and others please.

Boot Environments in the OpenSolaris OS: Versatility Exemplified

A March article on Sun Developer Network, Managing Boot Environments With OpenSolaris Package Manager, tells you how to manipulate BEs in the OpenSolaris OS. That is, efficiently and safely install, update, or delete software.

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How to Make GlassFish Web Space Server Work With OpenSSO

You can integrate GlassFish Web Space Server, Sun's portal platform, with OpenSSO, a Sun-sponsored open-source project that delivers security for Web applications, single sign-on (SSO), federation, and identity services. In a recent blog, Sun's Rajesh R. tells you how to do that efficiently, complete with an illustration of the deployment and the steps for the related downloads, installations, and configurations. Easy as pie, it looks like.

Have a try yourself?

White Paper on Sun's Approach to Identity Management

Sun has a practical approach for identity management, as described in a recent white paper (in PDF) on sun.com, Keeping It Simple: A Pragmatic Approach to Identity Management. The paper first defines the importance of identity in Web applications and summarizes the subsequent chapters. Four chapters then follow, which focus on—

• The requirements for an effective identity infrastructure
• The pragmatic approach taken by Sun
• Sun's identity solutions
• Real-life examples

Reading a high-level writeup like that gives one a wide perspective. I enjoyed it.

June 2009

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Running the OpenSolaris OS From a Browser

OpenDS and OpenSSO on FISL's Presentation Agenda in Brazil This Week

OpenDS 2.0.0 Release Candidate 2 Ships

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