Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is almost here

As I'm sure you're all aware OpenWorld is almost upon us. I haven't been since 2009 so I'm pretty excited to be able to go this year.

For those of you going a couple of items of interest:

There's a Meet and Greet with the Identity Management Team on Wednesday afternoon so if you're around please stop by.

My Hands On Lab (HOL10478) on Monday afternoon at the Marriott is currently fully booked but the weather looks like it's going to be amazing. If you haven't been able to get in you might want to try just showing up and see if anyone blows it off. If you're desperate to get in for some crazy reason send me an email or leave a comment here and I'll see if I can convince the room monitor to let a few extra people in.

There are a bunch of interesting sessions on the IdM track this year and unless I have booth duty or a meeting you'll probably find me sitting in the back of most those sessions. If you see me please say hi.

See you at OpenWorld!

Virtual Directory Performance Tuning Guidelines

In its simplest deployment possible, a Virtual directory has a listener, a server component and an adapter that talks to a backend target. In such a deployment, the Virtual directory only plays the role of being a proxy that receives a request, forwards it to the target and sends the response back from the target to the client.

In such a deployment, one can still encounter performance issues if OVD isn’t tuned adequately.

Front-ending a SAML Service Provider with OHS

This is a follow-up to one of my previous posts titled Integrating OBIEE 11g into Weblogic’s SAML SSO, where I mention the following when configuring the Service Provider:

“The Published Site URL field value is the base URL for federation services on the server. For SAML2, make sure the webcontext path is saml2. This is going to be used in the metadata file as the prefix to build the ACS (Assertion Consumer Service) endpoint necessary for allowing an Identity Provider to properly communicate with this Service Provider.”

“When OBIEE managed servers are in a cluster, there’s typically an HTTP load balancer in front of the servers. In such case, make sure the Published Site URL refers to the name and port of the load balancer, because they are the ones the IdP needs to know.”

In this post, I assume there’s an OHS (Oracle HTTP Server) proxying requests to OBIEE analytics application, which is a fairly common production scenario. Let’s take a look at the necessary configuration changes to make it work.

Attaching OWSM policies to JRF-based web services clients

I've recently came across a question in one of our internal mailing lists where a person was under the impression that he would have to write code to propagate the identity when making a web service call using OWSM policies. My answer was something like: "depending on the type of your client you may have to write some very small piece of code to attach a policy, but you should not write code at all to either retrieve the executing client identity or to do the propagation itself". Fortunately, I had an unpublished article that applied 100% to his use case. And here it is now (a little bit revamped).

OWSM (Oracle Web Services Manager) is Oracle's recommended method for securing SOAP web services. It provides agents that encapsulate the necessary logic to interact with the underlying software stack   on both service and client sides. Such agents have their behavior driven by policies. OWSM ships with a bunch of policies that are adequate to most common real world scenarios.

Applying policies to services and clients is usually a straightforward task and can be accomplished in different ways. This is well described in the OWSM Administrators Guide. Looking from the client perspective, the docs describe how to attach policies to SOA references, connection-based clients (typically ADF-based clients) and standard Java EE-based clients using either Enterprise Manager or wlst.

Oracle FMW components (like OWSM agents) are typically deployed on top of a thin software layer called JRF (Java Required Files), providing for the required interoperability with software stacks from different vendors.

This post is a step-by step showing how to code a JRF-based client and attach OWSM policies to it at development-time using Oracle JDeveloper.

OIM-OAM-OAAM integration using TAP

I was going to make a test post just to test our RSS feed.  However, Atul Kumar published a good introductory post today on OAM-OAAM-OIM integration.  So I figured that I would share that with you today and suggest it as a little light weekend reading.

You can find Atul's post here.