In version 3.4 midPoint has got a really nice GUI. It is well suited for operational tasks. However, it lacks some features to support development and maintenance of really complex midPoint deployments. Main pain points are perhaps missing integration with git (or other version control systems) and limited support for editing complex XML objects. Because of this we’ve recently created a prototype of MidPoint Development Tools for Eclipse.
Test-Driven Development (TDD) tells us to write the tests first and only then develop the code. It may seem like a good idea. Like a way how to force lazy developers to write tests. How to make sure that the code is good and does what it should do. But there’s the problem. If you are doing something new, something innovative, how the hell are you supposed to know what the code should do? […]
In identity management there is a class of petty issues that appear and re-appear all the time. Even though these issues are easy to understand, they are tricky to completely eliminate and they often have very nasty consequences. These seemingly unimportant issues frequently result in nights spent resolving a total breakdown of IDM system. What is this devil that kills sleep and keeps engineers away from the families? It is the daemon of case insensitivity and his friends. […]
Life of a midPoint developer is a colorful one. There are enjoyable periods of building things when you have a luxury of undisturbed raising smaller or larger pieces of code. But sometimes there comes an interrupt: you break something in such a way that you are not able to find what is wrong – for hours or even for days, occasionally. Also regularly, after “feature freeze” points, there arrive periods of intensive and merciless hunting of remaining bugs. Besides this, often a colleague, customer, partner or a friend on the mailing list comes with a problem he or she urgently needs to help with.
The core of midPoint – IdM Model Subsystem – is an extremely powerful and flexible computation engine. It can be configured to implement almost all policies one could imagine. But with such flexibility comes potential (and sometimes very real) complexity: for more advanced configurations it is very easy to make a mistake that, with a bit of bad luck, manifests itself in a quite unexpected way.
Identity Management (IDM) systems usually provide quite a broad mix of features. But there is one thing that no other system can do: management of access rights. No other system comes even close, even if they often pretend to do so. Access rights, privileges, role assignments, authorities, authorizations … whatever these things are called they need to be managed. They need to be assigned to the right people in the right systems at the right time. And that is no easy task. […]
Just few months passed since our last release called Tycho and yet we would like to introduce you to midPoint’s new face: Lincoln. Inspired by a man who supported internal improvements of society and orderly progress, midPoint 3.3 follows his steps with many subtle improvements to both user interface and internal midPoint logic, which takes the usability to another level. […]
There are not many occasions when a CxO of a big software company speaks openly about sensitive topics. Few days ago that happened to Oracle. Oracle’s CSO Mary Ann Davidson posted a blog entry about reverse engineering of Oracle products. Although it was perhaps not the original intent of the author, the blog post quite Read more about Oracle Security[…]
A significant part of open source software is developed by small independent companies. Such companies have small and highly motivated teams that are incredibly efficient. The resulting software is often much better than comparable software created by big software vendors. Especially in the Identity and Access Management (IAM) field there are open source products that Read more about Open Source Identity Ecosystem Idea[…]
My recent posts about ForgeRock attracted a lot of attention. The reactions filled the spectrum almost completely. I’ve seen agreement, disagreement, peaceful and heated reactions. Some people were expressing thanks, others were obviously quite upset. Some people seem to take it as an attack on ForgeRock. This was not my goal. I didn’t want to Read more about Pax[…]
I started my work on OpenIDM almost precisely five years ago . At that time, ForgeRock was only a couple of months old. OpenIDM was just a very small bunch of ragtag prototype code that did not make much sense. I was the only one in the team that had any product development and architecture Read more about From OpenIDM to Success[…]