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simAXS

“ SimAXS saves hours of time because I can write Single Sign-on protected components right on my development machine... With simAXS, we are able to do 100% of development and baseline testing offline in our environment.”

- Levi Rosol, Two Rivers Marketing

Features and Benefits

Many commercial single-sign on tools implement external security through the use of HTTP Headers. A "Policy Agent" or "WebGate" is installed into the application's web server to handle authentication and authorization. The agent passes information about the logged in user (often including the username, roles, groups, and permissions) to the application using HTTP headers. The application extracts this information from the HTTP context and uses it to drive application functionality.

This approach provides interoperability and flexibility, but has some drawbacks. It is difficult or impossible for developers to insert HTTP Headers programmatically because HTTP servers are opaque. Therefore teams have the following choices:

1. Run a complex Single Sign-on stack in their development environment.
2. Work while continually tethered to a shared server on the corporate network.
3. Fake integrations using hard-coded variables and form based stubs (and hope things work when they are deployed to the integration test area)

Taken together these challenges result in days or weeks of wasted time on a typical project. Problems with shared data and access control can complicate things even further.

The simAXS product promises a better way to work

It simulates an access management environment by passing HTTP headers and cookies directly into an application development environment. Instead of depending on a shared system or hard-coded "stub code" the tool allows each developer control of the data passed into their standalone development environment. The simAXS tool works by installing a small ISAPI filter into IIS that gains full control of the web server, just like the popular access management systems. The following diagram describes the simAXS architecture.

This approach provides many benefits:

• Completely transparent to your application - simAXS looks just like a WebGate or Policy Agent to your code
• Simulated single sign-on with direct access to resources - set HTTP Headers and Cookies that will pass credentials and data to applications
• Simplify - simAXS eliminates the need for special "stub" code or simulated login screens for local development
• Full control of data - manage multiple profiles that map directly to your development databases
• Freedom from shared development servers - work in a local development environment or disconnect from the network entirely
• Easily perform unit and integration tests on applications - works with tools like *unit, Selenium, LoadRunner
• No need to remember multiple usernames and passwords
• No complicated server side components like LDAP or SSL
• No waiting on system administrators or security administrators for installations and configurations
• 5 minute setup guaranteed - simple integration with IIS, Visual Studio .NET, and other web application platforms

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