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Smee 0.5.0: Publish and be damned impressed

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New export options for Smee, including three WAYF/Discovery formats.

A major new release for the main Smee library, 0.5.0: the publish features have been rewritten and extended with more formats and options. When Smee was started it was very much focused on consuming SAML metadata, but the new features in version 0.5.0 now make it possible to export metadata too.

It may eventually be practical to use Smee to produce federation metadata as well as consume it.

Publishing formats

  • saml - Smee will output the entity data as a SAML metadata file. There’s no signing yet so this isn’t suitable for publishing to others, but may be useful for applications within an organisation.
  • index - A simple plain text list of entityID URIs and (optionally) names, as used by some of our services, and as an MDQ extension
  • disco - Smee can now publish metadata in the JSON DiscoFeed format, as used by Shibboleth WAYF/Discovery services
  • thiss - alternatively Smee can convert metadata to the format used by Seamless Access services
  • udisco and udest- we have some of our own WAYF/Discovery tools with their own format, uDisco, which is a much smaller and more efficient format than DiscoFeed. I’ll write more about this in the future.
  • markdown - we still have the old Markdown publishing format, for when you just want to document a list of entities in a nice table.

Aggregates and individual items

Out of a misguided urge to be consistent, all output format can produce both aggregates and collections of individual files. For some this makes a lot of sense - SAML metadata can be output as singe file aggregates or as MDQ-style collections - for others it’s possibly useful but keeps the API consistent.

We now have over 1100 tests for the main Smee library.

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