Interesting developments in Sakai land.

I’ve now ported the GSK to Guanxi2 and tested it with Sakai 2.5.3. With the upgrade to Guanxi2 it now has full metadata/trust handling for shibboleth federations. The integration points with Sakai are a SakaiAuthenticator, SakaiAttributor and SakaiCookeHandler. You can get the kit from the github repo:

http://github.com/codebrane/gsk/tree/master

documentation is at:

http://www.guanxi.uhi.ac.uk/drguanxi/index.php/Sakai_Guanxi_Shibb_Kit

Wei Jie at the University of Manchester has just let me know the finished paper, on which I’m a co-author, is ready for public consumption. Wei submitted it to the International Workshop on Security and Privacy in Enterprise Computing (InSPEC 2008), titled:

A Guanxi Shibboleth based Security Infrastructure for e-Social Science.

It’s based on Sakai, Permis and Guanxi and is the first use of the GSK in the wild that I know of.

You can download the paper here.

I’ve now linked Fedora to Sakai using the architecture I outlined previously and here is the result. I’ve tested all the resource types and the only one that is causing problems is citations list: (more…)

Sakai, meet Fedora. Fedora, meet Sakai: (more…)

I’ve sorted the problem I had with specifying truststores in Axis2. I don’t have to use the crude method of specifying the location and password in System properties. Instead, I’ve combined the Guanxi SSL Layer probing functionality with a custom ProtocolSocketFactory that makes use of the truststore that the Guanxi SSL probing populates. (more…)

Having sorted out web service client implementations for Fedora, I’ve been abstracting it all out into a set of interfaces and implementations which I’ve termed the Web Services Abstraction Layer (WSAL). This lets me keep the interface between Sakai and Fedora fairly high level, working with metadata and object Objects rather than raw XML. It’s also a possible larger framework for integrating content repositories into Sakai. When I’ve got it all tested and working I’ll commit to our svn and let folk know how to use it.

Now that I’ve plumbed Fedora skeletons into Sakai’s Content Hosting system, I’ve turned the focus onto Fedora, to build up a library of functionality that I can use in Sakai. (more…)

The lack of any documentation on the CHH system other than a paragraph and a page of possible implementation scenarios has slowed me down a bit. I’ve managed to deduce that uploading a specially formatted XML file as a resource and setting its mountpoint property, in “Edit details” to the Fedora CHH impl: (more…)

Spoke too soon. Or perhaps not. Seems I caught trunk with its knickers down, again. I waited a while then did an svn up on db and it built. Trying to start the damn thing was another mess though. A sudden requirement for a UTF-8 database has appeared, something to do with binary guff, so I blew away the old database and created a new one, UTF-8 enabled. That cured that problem and the rickety cart nudged forward a few feet, ’til the next problem. (more…)