New Segment of Access Manager-Federation Manager FAQ on Liberty and SAML

Question

Sun Developer Network just published a new segment of a Sun Java System Access Manager and Sun Java System Federation Manager FAQ on Liberty Alliance and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). See http://developers.sun.com/identity/overview/faq/libertysaml.jsp.
The Q&As also shed light on those products' support for identity-based services in Access Manager, on the utilities for creating and maintaining federated connections, on the components in Federation Manager, and on other related topics.

Answer 1

This may not be the same as the problem you are seeing, but I was recently struggling with debugging an SSL connection out of the amserver, and eventually noticed that the amserver uses its own protocol handler rather than the sun.net.www.protocol included in java 1.4 and above. My guess is that this is because the amserver is older than java 1.4 but I'm not sure, they may have some other reason for using their own implementation.
If you look at the web server server.xml after the amserver install, you will see a line like:
<JVMOPTIONS>-Djava.protocol.handler.pkgs=com.iplanet.services.comm</JVMOPTIONS>
if you replace that with:
<JVMOPTIONS>-Djava.protocol.handler.pkgs=sun.net.www.protocol</JVMOPTIONS>
you might get the pre-amserver behaviour that you are after. Basically all of the httpsURLConnection things behave subtly differently otherwise, as when getting a HttpsURLConnection you are getting a com.iplanet.services.comm.https.HttpsURLConnection rather than a sun.net.www.protocol.https.HttpsURLConnection as you might be expecting.