Thursday, April 30, 2009

openinfocard new version

I just uploaded a new version of the openinfocard selector to http://code.google.com/p/openinfocard/downloads/list.
Please give it a try.

The changes are mainly internal but huge and important. After over a year of despair caused by several java plugin2 hiccups and a lingering "stale reference to a java vm"-error I think that I now have improved the code so that development of new features makes much more sense then before. I had the feeling that SUN and Mozilla are pulling away the ground under my feet, but now I think this period is over.

Some improvements are "visible" when you try the selector with "complicated" IdP's. I improved the metadata parsing through hefty use of E4X. The OSIS endpoints do not fall into this category but if you test this openinfocard version e.g. with a Geneva server you might see what I mean. We have set up Geneva servers in our lab and openinfocard immediately failed. I fixed this; although I am sure that there are WS-* variants that still cause the selector to flip.
BTW: By fixing some of these faults I "improved" the internal cardstore format. This causes old cardstores to become unusable. Sorry, please remove the cards from your current cardstore and reimport them. There is no automatic conversion...

Jave6 u12 or newer is now a requirement. I have only tested it on Windows XP SP3 32bit but I am quite confident that this selector runs everywhere where Firefox 3 and java6 is available.

Next steps:
- code cleanup. Throw away now unused code.
- XRDS support for X-XRDS-Location meta tag (nearly ready)
- phone selector integration

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice to see an update of openinfocard but is there a way to use the .NET infocard support instead of the openinfocard selector?

Unknown said...

The extension on Codeplex, sometime dubbed Cardspace for Firefox, is here: http://identityselector.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=18845
It and openinfocard are separate extensions to Firefox. I thought about directly adding Cardspace support into openinfocard but each needs its own developement environment. So I guess the advantages are not that big and I guess that most people will only install and use one selector.

Anonymous said...

I have used the one from codeplex. Unfortunately, its not very reliable and isn't regularly updated (it doesn't work on any 3.1/3.5 beta).

I'd consider moving fulltime to openinfocard IF I could import a card from .net. Also the ability to move the card to a USB thumbdrive is important so I can bring my cards with me.