XDI TC Notes

Following are the notes of the unofficial telecon of the XDI TC held on:

Date: Monday, 28 December 2015 USA
Time: 10:00AM - 11:30AM Pacific Time (17:00-18:30 UTC)

The TC operates under a standing rule approved 17 July 2008 under which the TC does not hold regular official meetings and conducts all business by electronic ballot only. Unofficial weekly meetings are held to enable discussion among members but no business is conducted nor actions taken.

ATTENDING

Drummond Reed
Les Chasen
Markus Sabadello
Christopher Allen

REGRETS

Update on Publishing XDI Core 1.0 Committee Specification Draft 01

Drummond will give a brief report on his progress.

https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/xdi/201511/msg00011.html

Drummond said he cc’d the TC mailing list

XDI Agent Demo

Markus can demo an XDI agent (a Java desktop app) that can connect to XDI endpoints. This was an expanded version of what he demonstrated on the last call.

First he showed how Alice and Bob can each create a link contract to register a local XDI agent to their XDI endpoint (called a personal cloud in the demo).

Next, Alice sends a connection request to Bob. This goes from Alice’s XDI agent to her XDI endpoint via a Websocket connection, to Bob’s XDI endpoint, and then is pushed to Bob’s XDI agent via another Websocket connection.

Les asked what happens if Bob’s agent is not online to receive notification of the connection request. Markus demo’d how Bob’s agent can request pending connection requests from Bob’s XDI endpoint whenever it comes online and present them to Bob for approval.

Markus next showed how Alice can now access Bob’s profile using the approved connection.

Drummond asked about how the temporary $push link contracts get cleaned up after they are used to send the acknowledgement message. Markus has not implemented that yet, but his plan is that the link contract expires after a single use.

Markus also showed how the link contract to Bob’s profile could include a $push permission so that Alice received updates whenever Bob made a change. This would be XDI change-of-address capability.

Next Markus showed how Alice can send Bob a connection invitation—the inverse of a connection request. With a connection invitation, Alice is offering to share one of her profiles with Bob. Bob needs to approve that invitation, which results in Bob’s XDI endpoint sending a connection request to Alice’s XDI endpoint. Given that Alice issued the invitation, Alice’s XDI endpoint should automatically approve the connection request from Bob.

In this demo, the sending operations use HTTP POST and the receiving operations use the Websocket connection since that was the easiest path to the first implementation. However both the send and receive operations can (and should) be done over a Websocket connection for improved performance.

Christopher asked about the structure of the link contracts and what they provided permissions for. Markus showed that right now the link contracts are providing broad $get permissions instead of more targeted access to specific profile items, but that is simply a matter of writing a narrower link contract.

Markus confirmed that all of this demo is consistent with his work on the XDI Messaging, XDI Bindings, and XDI Link Contracts specifications, and also with the walkthroughs of the “change of address” and “secure messaging” scenarios Markus worked on earlier this year:

https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/56431/ChangeOfAddress-diagrams%20v2.pdf

https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/56432/ChangeOfAddress-text%20v2.pdf

https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/56632/SecureMessaging-diagram.pdf

https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/56631/SecureMessaging-text.pdf

The code of the demo is available here:

https://github.com/projectdanube/XDINinja-swing

NEXT REGULAR CALL

The next call will be the following week at the usual time (Monday 10AM PT). The link to where agenda items can be posted for the next meeting is: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19oDl0lbb56Grehx2a5flZnhrgnua5l8cVvC_dJ8fTXk/edit?usp=sharing

xdi message