GRIA 5.3 is now available for download from www.gria.org. GRIA 5.3 includes many new capabilities requested by GRIA users to allow them to support new business models, improve overall B2B flexibility and provide better vertical integration with existing tooling.

The release includes significant enhancements to the Client API to support client application integration (e.g. portals) and for client orchestration of complex federation scenarios. Some client applications provide management of multiple different users, for example, a "portal" providing a web interface to GRIA that is accessed using a normal web-browser. GRIA now supports the ability to dynamically set client identities on a per-invocation basis.

The discovery and selection of federation contexts (SLAs, Security Tokens) that are used to control business relationships during service invocations can be complex and GRIA 5.3 makes major steps towards automation of these processes. GRIA now supports that ability for service providers to offer services managed by multiple federation contexts. This capability can be used to support 3rd party licensing scenarios where a client creating a new job, quotes an SLA with the provider of the job service (granting them access to CPU time) and a second SLA with the software vendor (granting them a license to use the software). Another example, is where a client wants to access a shared resource (e.g. a file or database) but does not know where to get a security token that is sufficient for the resources access control policy. GRIA now supports the ability to dynamically discover token sources and chain multiple token issuance requests automatically.

Windows and .NET client integration is even easier. .NET client applications can be integrated directly with the GRIA client API by running IKVM. A new Microsoft Active Directory (Kerberos) single-sign-on service has also been added to the client management package. This service issues X.509 credentials based on users' local Kerberos or Active Directory credentials. For example, a user can log in to their Windows desktop by entering their Windows username and password as usual, and then automatically be issued with an X.509 certificate which they can use to access remote resources.

For this release, GRIA maintains SOAP-level interoperability with minor releases (e.g. 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2 clients and services can all talk to each other). In addition, users with existing GRIA 5.x installations are provided with an automated upgrade capability executed when GRIA is deployed within the service container.

GRIA 5.3 makes secure service-oriented collaboration even easier for consumers, providers and developers.

Download GRIA 5.3 now!