UDDI AG meeting and SAML: SAML in UDDI and XQuery subsets.

["Orchard, David" <dorchard@jamcracker.com>]

I attended the UDDI AG meeting this week, and a few SAML related items came
up.

The use of SAML for SSO onto multiple UDDI repositories was questioned
strongly by Maryanne Hondo of IBM.  The logic is that if everything is
replicated, why support SSO?  Personally, I think this ought to be supported
to support transition between public and private registries, which have
different data sets.  

I lobbied Maryanne to support model extensions for security.  This would
allow a business entity to specify in standard tModel the security
mechanisms it supported, ie username/password and SAML.  This is not a
security requirement per se, but more of modelling requirement.

We may want SAML to formally liase with UDDI on these and other issues.

On a somewhat related note, I supported Vadim of BEA's lobbying for the use
of XQuery to query UDDI repositories.  There was strong resistance to use of
the full spec.  I suggested publicly and privately that a subset of XQuery
be used.  Chris Kurt of Microsoft and overall UDDI lead was extremely
interested in this idea.  I further suggested that UDDI formally respond to
the XQuery working drafts, indicating what features it may/would be
interested in subsetting.  I also think that SAML should do this, and will
volunteer to write a draft no matter what SAML decides to do on SAML ver 1.0
wrt XQuery.  This serves a few purposes: 1) I'm hoping that requests from
UDDI and/or SAML will place pressure on XQuery to formally subset or profile
XQuery; 2) If UDDI can place pressure, they may do some of the work that
SAML could then pick up; 3) Increase the likelihood of lightweight XQuery
implementations, removing some of the SAML vendor concerns about complexity;
4) if any members of the XQuery WG (including the chair?) have inclinations
to do profiles or subsets of XQuery, these could be powerful motivators.

Cheers,
Dave Orchard
XML Architect
Jamcracker Inc.,    19000 Homestead Dr., Cupertino, CA 95014
p: 408.864.5118     m: 604.908.8425    f: 408.725.4310

www.jamcracker.com - Sounds like a job for Jamcracker.