Recently in Identity and Access Management Category

As of late on the IAM effort, we have been involved in an evaluation of application servers.  Actually this is our second round of doing so.  Last year, we did an evaluation of Mule, ServiceMix and Geronimo.  At the time Geronimo, being fully Java 5 EE compliant, turned out to be a good choice for development.  We liked it because it had a great plug-in for Eclipse and it met all of our needs at the time.  As part of our project's functionality we needed to use Java Messaging Services (JMS).  The problem we ran into with Geronimo was it did not support the STOMP protocol.  So we re-grouped and switched to IBM's WebSphere Community Edition.  The message problem was solved, we thought.  Then we tired to use SSL for messaging and found the support in WebSphere CE to be lacking.

So, we commenced round #2, which included: Tomcat, WebSphere, JBoss and WebLogic.  Since all of our Web Services were SOAP-based we needed a really good servlet container, which Tomcat is.  However we needed other features like the messaging, which Tomcat does not provide, but the other products did.  We ended up doing a lot of timing tests and evaluations and our winner is?  WebLogic.  It is a very fast Application Server, and it met all of our requirements.  Since our development is going to be using Oracle, the tight integration between the database and the application server also made it an attractive choice.  And the runner up was Tomcat BTW.  Probably the best servlet container out there.  Why did we not select it?  Mainly because of having to add other tools either to it or standalone to meet the requirements that we have come up with.  Timing results are below.

One of our next big steps for the IAM project is to work on building an on-line community.  We have looked at a few hosted sites like ning.com and so on.  But none of them met our requirements.  Being that our project is all about identity, our most important requirement is any solution we select, must be able to use our Penn State credentials.  We also want something that is open, so that members of other Universities can join the community. 

Yesterday at our IAM TAG (Technical Architect Group) meeting we had a guest speaker, Cole Camplese.  Cole gave us a number of good ideas on how to build a community.  Right now we are looking at two software solutions, elgg and Drupal + Social Networking Modules.  elgg looks interesting, but it does not look easy to integrate with WebAccess.  However I did not spend much time investigating that.  We do have Drupal up and are continuing to investigate that also.  So far that is looking to very interesting.  If anyone out there has other solutions that could meet our requirement, please comment on this post.