Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Why do just about all Liberty demos emphasize alcohol?

I know why it's a significant focus of our meetings, but our demos ....?

Hubert le Van Gong has a post on a Sun demo of a Java applet implementation of an identity selector.

A user is visiting an online Wine Shop (as opposed to the gazillion other types of SPs that Hubert could have chosen) and the SP needs to know that the user is of an age allowed to buy booze.

The SP advertises this identity requirements to the applet, which then does a number of things:

1) uses Liberty WSF protocols to discover appropriate identity providers
2) allow the user to select the desired provider
3) interact with the chosen provider from #2 to retrieve the required identity data
4) hand the identity info from #3 to the SP.

The demo nicely demonstrates the support within the Liberty architecture for client-hosted functionality, here it's an identity selector and a client to network hosted identity services.

It also nicely continues the pattern established by the NTT demo of the 'Online Beer Shoppe'. Are we seeing a nascent market for federated identity rear its head?

I do wonder why Hubert didn't have the applet querying the user's nationality so that French customers wouldn't even be shown the plonk pages.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Touché!
I never saw it from that angle while I was "working" on the demo. Wine came soooo naturally - nothing to do with the glass by my laptop... ;-)

Cheers,
Hubert

PS: working for a US company it was hard to have the applet do what you suggest but I'll make sure that European Governements add this essential customization to their wise mandate of Liberty ID-WSF!