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Overview of the CA SiteMinder® Federation Java SDK

This section contains the following topics:

Java SDK Functionality

Java SDK Files

Java SDK Functionality

The CA SiteMinder® Federation Java SDK is a library for interacting with an HTTP cookie that contains user identity information. The Java SDK supports the open format cookie. The open format cookie is a string of UTF-8 bytes. This format includes associated encryption algorithms designed so that information can be securely communicated between CA SiteMinder® and end-user applications. Applications can be written in any common Web programming language. Using the Java SDK is not required to create an open format cookie.

Typically, CA SiteMinder® sets user identity information into an HTTP cookie for consumption by an end-user application. End-user applications can use the Java SDK to extract identity information, the authentication context, name ID, and name ID format from the cookie. In addition, third-party Web access managers can create a cookie and provide user credentials to CA SiteMinder®.

Java SDK Files

The CA SiteMinder® Federation Java SDK is implemented as several Java archive files. You specify their location during installation. The most important file, fedsdk.jar, contains the IFederationOpenIdentity.java and other supporting Java classes. Your Java application must instantiate an implementation object for one of this interface and call the methods as your requirements dictate.