Sun Gives Companies Tool To Test Liberty Identity Specs

By Richard Karpinski

Sun Microsystems this week released a prototype of the recently approved Liberty Alliance specifications that it says will help companies get a jump-start with the Internet identity technology.

The Sun Interoperability Prototype is an open-source implementation of the Liberty 1.0 specs. It is designed to let developers -- both enterprise developers and other vendors -- build their own Liberty-enabled apps or test the interoperability of products claiming to be based on Liberty standards.

It is not a formal product release, and falls short of a full software development kit (SDK). Rather, it is a way for companies to get started with Liberty even before the first Liberty-compliant products appear, said Andy Eliopoulos, Sun's senior director-product marketing for network identity.

"It's free, it's open, and people can do with it what they want," said Eliopoulos. "It allows developers to build and write to the Liberty specifications. It's essentially a developer tool."

Liberty 1.0 was approved several months ago, with vendors promising to release Liberty-compliant products by year's end. The specifications are built on standards such as SAML, XML, and SOAP, and are designed to provide a baseline way for individuals to share their network identity online and for companies to manage and consume identity data.

The lynchpin of Liberty is the concept of "federation," which lets companies manage identity on a decentralized basis.

One such identity product is Sun's own Sun ONE Identity Server 6.0, which the vendor unveiled in July as a complete, end-to-end identity-management platform. The server is currently available as an early-access release.

The future of the Sun Interoperability Prototype depends on user demand, as well as how the identity market shakes out, said Eliopoulos.

"If there is demand around identity management and Liberty, then I think we'll put significant effort into sustaining the prototype and moving it forward," he said. "What we saw clearly was that once the Liberty announcements were made, the developer community was looking for something they could play with."

The Liberty prototype is available for free download.