Access Gate

From SPACE Wiki

The SPACE Access Gate is a small, reusable proxy for operation-centric service calls. In other words, it can redirect and intercept SOAP connections over HTTP. There are three main reasons why this is being done: To check the user's permission to invoke a service through authentication and authorisation, to monitor invocation-level metrics like the response times and payload transmissions, and to use this data for possible postprocessing steps such as billing purposes in commercial environments.

A web interface exists for the administration of backend service mappings, including a TinySecUrl mapper.

Note that for resource-centric services, any authenticating HTTP proxy could be used in lieu of Access Gate.

Technologies

The proxy is written in PHP. It uses the PHP database abstraction layer to connect to databases for user lookups, monitoring storage and service mappings.

Authentication is supported through the password and digest variants of the WS-Security username token profile.

Scientific Material and Documentation

Access Gate comes with a manual.

Some blog posts are available: [1], [2]

No scientific publications related to Access Gate available yet.

See also related work.

Download/Version Control

Before a stable release becomes available, a Git checkout from the Code Repository will be required. Alternatively, a pre-packaged snapshot version can be installed. See Package Repository for details.

• Package installation: % apt-get install access-gate
• Git checkout: % git clone http://serviceplatform.org/code/.git
• Git browsing: http://serviceplatform.org:8000/trac/browser/platform-services/access-gate