Thursday, October 8, 2015

Make your CXF JAX-RS servers OpenId Connect ready

We've been doing a lot of work during the last year to ensure CXF developers can start experimenting fast and effectively with the latest RS security advancements such as OAuth2 and JOSE which are also the building blocks for OpenId Connect (OIDC).

With OAuth2 and JOSE modules becoming quite solid, it was time to turn the attention to OIDC, OIDC RP being a starting point - which is a mechanism to log on the users into the servers by federating to OIDC IDP providers such as Google and Facebook.  OIDC is a fairly complex protocol but with OAuth2 and JOSE covered it was not that tricky after all.

The initial result is these two demos:

1. BigQuery


This demo shows a client OAuth2 server that accesses a user's BigQuery data-sets. The demo checks a public data-set of Shakespeare works but once you have a Google Developer account you can easily create your own BigQuery data-set and use the demo to access it instead.

2. Basic OIDC

This demo shows that a server does not have to be specifically coded around OAuth2 flows to use OIDC - it only uses OIDC to log-in the users and then work with these users.

I'd like to encourage you to run these demos - ask at CXF users or #apache-cxf if you have any issues running them and start making your CXF servers OIDC-aware now !

I look forward to the feedback from the early adopters. And please watch this space - this is only a start :-)

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