Hi,
So it's been a while since any of the core dev team made much public comment
about whats been going, those watching SVN are aware but I thought it would
be useful to make things a little more transparent.

Firstly we have a new web presence, a little cleaner then before and
highlights facts about the project that ohloh are kindly assembling from our
source repositories.

Our development has progressed the project significantly and we continue to
deploy the current version at customer sites. Some highlights of recent
additions/work:
* ESOE Manager has been fully re-worked featuring -
  * GWT Ajax interfaces
  * XML syntax highlighting, formatting and indenting for XML configuration
components
  * Dashboard showing all the latest activations, crypto expiry and
environment stats
  * A fully GUI driven policy editor, with the ability to edit the policy
XML directly for advanced users
  * Crypto management from the UI including issuance and removal of key data
  * Service and indepentant node management for activations and shutdowns
  * Policy driven UI presentation and service management, your service
admins can only access services they have explicit permission to modify.

* ESOE Startup is being retired. This has been replaced by a much easier to
use command line utility called ESOE deployer.

* Performance tuning in all areas of the code base, paying particular
attention to performance with Terracotta for advanced deployments

* IIS filter has been developed and is working successfully on production
sites^

* OSX Apache Support

* New SAML 2.0 metadata processing, much more flexible than before including
support for unlimited sources of Metadata for cross federations

Moving towards 1.0 we're working on the following -
* Pipelining the /sso endpoint this will allow SAML processing to be much
more flexible on both ingress and egress. This work will additionally
complete our support for GET and Artifact SAML 2.0 profiles

* Apache/IIS C++ codebases will be further enchanced with additional logging
and a new logging framework.

So the 1.0 tags seems to be magic for a lot of folk to go production, even
though the codebase has been production deployed on numerous sites for some
time now. The good news is that us fussy devs we're finally getting ready to
hang the 1.0 tag on the project. We expect this to occur in the forth quater
this year.

At this point we'd be very happy to answer any queries any of you may have
about 1.0, future roadmaps or the available technology as it stands.

regards,
Bradley
--
Bradley Beddoes
Lead Software Architect
Intient Pty Ltd