Author Archives: Will Norris

Going to Google

I’m happy to announce today that I’ve accepted a job at Google, working on the newly formed Social Web team. I will be joining fellow new-hires Joseph Smarr and Chris Messina, as well as a host of other incredibly talented engineers, in contributing to the emerging standards and growing developer community in this space. Instead [...]
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Identity and Identifiers

I still remember when I made the conscious decision to go by the name “Will” instead of “William”. I was 11 or 12 years old, and we were moving from Irving, Texas, where we had lived the last 7 years or so, to Olive Branch, Mississippi. I don’t honestly recall why I decided to go [...]

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Java OpenID Library - Target Audience

One of the decisions that has to be made, or at least considered, early in the design of any software project is identifying your target audience. This is especially true of libraries that are designed to be integrated into other applications. Who do you expect to be using this library, and how do [...]

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Java OpenID Library - Configuration and Custom Messages

I previously described how message handling works in the Internet2 OpenID library, and how each OpenID message type requires a half dozen or so classes to handle everything. While this may seem like overkill to some, one of the nice things about this separation of logic is that it makes it quite simple to [...]

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Java OpenID Library Design - Message Handling

This past June I contracted with Internet2 to work on adding OpenID support to the Shibboleth Identity Provider. I had actually started to work on this over a year prior while working at USC. At the time there were (and still are) two primary OpenID libraries in Java, Verisign’s JOID, and Sxip’s OpenID4Java. [...]

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