My thoughts on Sxip

I should prefix this by stating that I don’t really know an awful lot about Sxip. The concept is interesting but I have yet to have the opportunity to pla
y with their system. However, they’ve been in the news recently so I’ll be reading over their materials on sxip.org, m
ight even try out their java development kits.

I think they look pretty cool. I’ve been meaning to listen to a talk by Dick Hardt on www.itconversations.com, but just haven’t had time to do it yet.

Its interesting to see how they’re building their market. Obviously they have an understanding of how open-source works (and how to make a business out of
it) and are already building substantial grass root support. That kind of an approach works very well with open source and they could really take off.

They are targetting the building blocks that people use for a lot of commercial applications (SDKs for php, perl, java, python and recent support in Drupal
and Bitflux). By attending all the notable conferences they are targetting and getting the attention of the medium-senior level application developers,
the kind of people that are active in technology decision making.

Microsoft has been trying to build a useful single-sign on network with their Passport service but it’s fairly platform specific. I’m a Java guy so it’s p
retty useless to me. Sun has their liberty alliance but I have no idea how that’s going (have not really had a need to follow it to date). Sxip is trying
to be as open as possible by providing SDKs and support for many different platforms. I’m not sure how mature their spec is but personal identity managem
ent on the internet will only become more important and evolve over the short-medium term. It’s something I’ll keep in the back of my mind, and it’s alway
s nice to see another local company doing well.