Based on the customer project, I wrote a DirXML driver which provision users through Novell Identity Manager 3.5.1 to their company intranet portal ( A Plone System).
The portal exposed the RESTful API interfaces.
So I started looking first at the Novell SOAP driver to see if it fit our needs. But while reading the driver documentation i felt it required too much XSLT knowledge + more customization and testing on the driver. And again it used the Apache HttpClient, Which is more a HttpClient rather then it targets to any specific protocol implementation. So If you could build SOAP messages at your own so it would help you in transporting these message back and forth between IDM and Application. The Novell SOAP driver comes up with two built in configurations "SPML and DSML", but in my case none of them were suitable.
I had always wished to write my own DirXML driver at my own, so I thought why not just take this opportunity to fulfill my wish and at the same time get some experience writing such driver.
The driver had the following requirements
1. One way Synchronization ( Idv-to-App)
1. Basic Authentication over Http(s) (Handling self-signed certificates)
2. SHA-1 Password Hashing ( One-way password sync) From Identity Vault to App
3. Http Tracing and file based logging
4. Application Schema aware driver.
5. Entitlement Support.
6. Support for Remote loader.
7. Support for Http method GET Cache. ( In case of migration of thousands of users).
8. Java 5 support
First I did research on How to get start with this.. My first resource was to go through all the code on the DirXML Developer Library, then I understood that I had to built the driver in two parts.
Part 1. The Driver It Self( Which actually converts XDS commands to the application specific commands)
Part 2. The Driver Shim ( Which is actually the library that talks to the Applicaiton API and sends results back to DirXML driver)
The first part was very clear and and required a little bit of understanding the code and how it implemented the required java interfaces.. the 2nd part was the actual work.
I did a research and found out the the open source project Glassfish/Jersey (https://jersey.dev.java.net/) was the right toolkit which supported most of my driver requirments and at the same time it was very Developer friendly and easy to work with.
Well it didn't support the Cache, so for that purpose I found out another open source library called "OScache" http://www.opensymphony.com/oscache/.. Which was very easy to work with and configure.
For testing purposes, I used the JUnit and a very nice and little tool called rest-client.
And hence after a week, I had successfully developed my own DirXML driver... but I still do not know how to figure out its Activation licensing.. Currently it does not required Activation!.
The portal exposed the RESTful API interfaces.
So I started looking first at the Novell SOAP driver to see if it fit our needs. But while reading the driver documentation i felt it required too much XSLT knowledge + more customization and testing on the driver. And again it used the Apache HttpClient, Which is more a HttpClient rather then it targets to any specific protocol implementation. So If you could build SOAP messages at your own so it would help you in transporting these message back and forth between IDM and Application. The Novell SOAP driver comes up with two built in configurations "SPML and DSML", but in my case none of them were suitable.
I had always wished to write my own DirXML driver at my own, so I thought why not just take this opportunity to fulfill my wish and at the same time get some experience writing such driver.
The driver had the following requirements
1. One way Synchronization ( Idv-to-App)
1. Basic Authentication over Http(s) (Handling self-signed certificates)
2. SHA-1 Password Hashing ( One-way password sync) From Identity Vault to App
3. Http Tracing and file based logging
4. Application Schema aware driver.
5. Entitlement Support.
6. Support for Remote loader.
7. Support for Http method GET Cache. ( In case of migration of thousands of users).
8. Java 5 support
First I did research on How to get start with this.. My first resource was to go through all the code on the DirXML Developer Library, then I understood that I had to built the driver in two parts.
Part 1. The Driver It Self( Which actually converts XDS commands to the application specific commands)
Part 2. The Driver Shim ( Which is actually the library that talks to the Applicaiton API and sends results back to DirXML driver)
The first part was very clear and and required a little bit of understanding the code and how it implemented the required java interfaces.. the 2nd part was the actual work.
I did a research and found out the the open source project Glassfish/Jersey (https://jersey.dev.java.net/) was the right toolkit which supported most of my driver requirments and at the same time it was very Developer friendly and easy to work with.
Well it didn't support the Cache, so for that purpose I found out another open source library called "OScache" http://www.opensymphony.com/oscache/.. Which was very easy to work with and configure.
For testing purposes, I used the JUnit and a very nice and little tool called rest-client.
And hence after a week, I had successfully developed my own DirXML driver... but I still do not know how to figure out its Activation licensing.. Currently it does not required Activation!.
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