Question

I am looking for an Opensource lightweight IAM to be used in development as a substitute for the real commercial IAM in production. Something with basic IAM functionalities, easy to install & easily configured to inject HTTP headers like user group.
Is OpenAM a good option? Any recommendations?

Answer 1

OpenAM comes from a very good pedigree…is forked from OpenSSO which is open-sourced code from the original SUN Access Manager product. OpenSSO was abandoned by Oracle after the Sun acquisition, so another company took it over and promoted a developer community around it.

Overall its a good choice for your requirements; that is:

1. Production-ready – yes, this version and previous versions have been used in production implementations
2. basic IAM functionality – it contains basic web access management functions and more than a few advanced features.
3. Inject HTTP headers – Yes, this is a standard function among web access management products.

In the past, a limitation with OpenAM/OpenSSO is that it required Sun Directory as the configuration store; however, this has changed with recent releases allowing other directories to be used.

Expect that installation and configuration of OpenAM to be rather command-line intensive; that is, with a minimal package installation and then options set in config files or thru utilities.

Hope that helps…