Alistair’s cakeBlog

I’ve just finished Shibboleth enabling Blackboard so I thought I’d publish a gist on how to access attributes from a Guanxi Guard. The Guard is a simple Servlet Filter that sits in front of your web application and does the Shibboleth or SAML2 handshakes. Once it’s finished, your application has access to the attributes from the Identity Provider that released them. There are two ways to do this. If your code doesn’t have access to the ServletContext, you can extract them from the request headers using this code. If you do have access to the context, you can load up the Pod directly and gain access to the attributes and the raw SAML they came in using the Pod API, using this code. The whole gist is here.

This is a update that improves explicit key validation and PKIX path validation, as well as improving the efficiency of the attributor process. The release is available from the project site. Read more »

I’ve just released the Guanxi IdP 2.1.0. Main update is a new JDBC Attributor to let you pull attributes from a database. You can download the IdP from the Sourceforge site. Read more »

BDD is looking good!

fruit-patch
Rakefile
  +- features
       fruity.feature
    +- step_definitions
          fruity_steps.rb

and what do the fruity contents contain? Read more »

I’ve been playing around with CouchDB and after installing it behind Apache, I wrote a small toolkit to work with it using Java and Ruby, called CouchKit. The Java bindings make use of the GSon library to let you work with domain objects instead of raw JSON. You can download it from my GitHub site. README tells you everything you need to know. I’ll most probably extend it as a small project to keep me busy in my spare time but I plan to use JCouchPotato in the Guanxi IdP as I’ll thinking of building a CouchDB database to hold non LDAP identity data.

I’ve started to tinker with CouchDB so here’s how to get up and running from the source distro. This is how I built everything from source on OS X. Read more »

I’ve been playing around with the latest version of Elgg, which is 1.6.1 but it became a little too difficult to keep up with conversations on group discussions and blogs, so I wrote a plugin to do it, BlogWatch. When you install it, you get a Subscribe button on a blog page as well as on a group discussion page:

I’ve always wondered how to do that really groovy opening of a new browser window, where the background window is greyed out. Well, I just found out, courtesy of Thickbox.

To add the functionality to the blog, I added this to the header.php of the current style:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/thickbox/jquery-latest.pack.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/thickbox/thickbox.js"></script>
<style type="text/css" media="all">
@import "/thickbox/thickbox.css";
</style> Read more »

I’ve been porting blog notifications from Elgg 0.9.2 to 1.6 and so needed to craft a domain model for it. Plumping for a new BlogWatch class with a subscribers “attribute” seemed the way to go:

class BlogWatch extends ElggEntity {

The first thing to contend with is when you create a new class:

$blog_watch = new BlogWatch();

the system calls the load() method for you. However, when you get an existing class via:

$blog_watch_objects = get_entities_from_metadata("watched_guid", $blog_guid);

it doesn’t. Read more »

How’s that for a headline? Yes indeed, I won third prize in the JISC MOSAIC developer competition, for my course book finder/reading list application:

iLib, The Course Book Finder Read more »