"There have been some who have rejected the open “meta” model in favor of just settling on tokens in the “concept de jour”. They urge us to forget about all these subtleties and just adopt SAML, or PKI, or whatever else meets someone’s use cases. But the sudden rise of OpenID shows exactly why we need a token-agnostic system. OpenID has great use cases that we should all recognize as important. And because of the new metasystem architecture, OpenID payloads can be selected and conveyed safely through the Information Card mechanisms just as well as anything else. To me it is amazing that the identity metasystem idea isn’t more than a couple of years old and yet we already have an impressive new identity technology arising. It provides an important example of why an elastic system like CardSpace is architecturally right.
It’s sometimes hard to explain how all this works under the hood. So I’ve decided to give a tutorial about “HelloWorld” cards. They don’t follow any format previously known to man - or even woman. They’re just someting made up to show elasticity. But I’m hoping that when you understand how the HelloWorld cards work, it will help you see the tremendous possibilities in the metasystem model.
The best way to follow this tutorial is to actually try things out. If you want to participate, install CardSpace on XP or use Vista, download a HelloWorld Card and kick the tires. (I’m checking now to see if other selector implementations will support this. If not, I know that compatibility is certainly the intention on everyones’ part).
The HelloWord card is just metadata for getting to a “helloworld” identity server. In upcoming posts I’ll explain how all this works in a way that I hope will make the technology very clear. I’ll also make the source code available. An interesting note here: the identity server is just a few hundred lines of code. "
Related Post:
Widget by [ Iptek-4u ]
