Sun OpenSSO Enterprise 8.0 Technical Overview

Identity Web Services

OpenSSO Enterprise contains client interfaces for authentication, authorization, session management, and logging in Java, C, and C++ (using a proprietary XML and SOAP over HTTP or HTTPs communication). These interfaces are used by policy agents and custom applications. Development using these interfaces, though, is labor-intensive. Additionally, the interfaces cause dependencies on OpenSSO Enterprise. Therefore, OpenSSO Enterprise has now implemented simple interfaces that can be used for:


Note –

Identity Web Services also interact with the Logging Service to audit and record Identity Web Services interactions.


These Identity Services are offered using either SOAP and the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) or Representational State Transfer (REST). With SOAP Identity Web Services, you point an integrated development environment (IDE) application project to the appropriate URL and generate the stub code that wraps the function calls to the services. (You can also use wscompile.) With REST Identity Web Services, no coding is necessary. It works right out of box.


Note –

OpenSSO Enterprise supports Eclipse, NetBeans, and Visual Studio®.


When Identity Web Services have been implemented, a user interacts with the application which calls the identity repository to retrieve user profile data for authentication and personalization, the configuration data store to retrieve policy data for authorization, and the audit repository for log requests. The application authenticates, authorizes, audits, and finally creates personalized services for the user by calling either the SOAP/WSDL or REST Identity Web Service as provided by OpenSSO Enterprise.

Figure 2–12 Basic Identity Web Services Process

Illustration of Identity Web Services process

For more information, see Part IV, The Web Services Stack, Identity Services, and Web Services Security.