Hello from Dublin and Happy New Year :)
We're at the very end of the Vordel company kick-off, but I wanted to get out a quick post to get the new blog moving in the right direction. Personally, I've been out of the habit a bit as I was winding down at Oracle, but one of my New Year's resolutions is to blog once a week - and lose 15 lbs.
Anyway, I wanted to let people know that there is a video of the OES and Vordel integration recorded by Mark O'Neill, CTO of Vordel. This is an integration that the A-Team and most notably Chris Johnson assisted Vordel do a while back.
The demo is the basic use case like the OES-OWSM integration that I did last year, except through the "magic" of the gateway, it can be done via a REST style web service.
Now, just in case you thought all integrations between OES and a gateway are the same, there is an important technical point about the Oracle Entitlments Server +Vordel integration as it compares to an Oracle Entitlements Server integration done by non-experts. The naive way to do this would be to go call out over XACML. I understand that XACML is standard and that OES supports it, but if we take the scenario that Mark discusses in the demo, a trader making a request for an options price, then creating the XML request, sending it to the XACML engine, parsing the XML response adds > 100ms of latency. The Oracle Entitelments Server + Vordel integration uses the Java SM - runs in-process - and is therefor contributes much lower latency. Did you ever meet a trader that could wait 100ms? Also, if the implementation calls out for authorization, you need to have 2 instances of the OES WS-SM running otherwise it comes a single point of failure. I think that its clear which approach is better.
I think that the best resolution of all of this would be for a broader adoption of OpenAz. Then you could have the best of both worlds....standard Java interface calling something in process. FYI, if the XACML standard is really important, then the Vordel Gateway can call out to XACML out of the box. The key point is that there are really measurable benefits to customers (better performance, operational simplicity) to having a tight integration.
