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March 2026 Update

March 2026 Update

A short update this month, as my retirement from Ohio State is days away, so busy getting last minute tasks done…

The post-mortem on the IdP 5.2 release is not bad though certainly not perfect. So far we have a few reports of regressions, although only one of them was what I would call major, the others involving some fairly esoteric configurations and features. We issued an immediate patch to deal with the worst issues and will certainly do another at some point before or early into summer, but more upgrade feedback is needed before we pull the trigger on that. At least one of the issues will take some effort to fully code around.

In the aftermath of that release, we reached two major project milestones:

  • The Metadata Aggregator V1.0.0 release is finally done after many years of use across a number of federations. Thank you to all the testers for allowing us to get that done.

  • The first SP 4 alpha release is available, though the Hub plugins are not being formally packaged at this time to make it easier to get new features and bug fixes for the time being. This is the result of about 6 months of design and coding time over the span of about 16 months of time.

The MDA is based on the same platform as IdP 5.2 and as noted last month, we expect to produce updates to it in lockstep with the IdP to maintain a consistent Java and Spring baseline across all our software. Since the SP Hub is packaged as IdP plugins and we are discontinuing the old Windows installers, all of our software save for the SP Agent(s) and the EDS will eventually be part of that single Java/Spring platform.

With the alpha released, the attention shifts to fielding feedback (of which there has been little so far), continuing work on the documentation as time permits, and eventually getting back to the next stages of development in a few weeks. We are allocating some time internally to work on stress testing the SP before development goes too much farther, in case we have any significant adjustments to make.

Other work in flight:

  • Redoing the IdP installation material to reflect the intent to discontinue the Windows installers. Some warnings are added now but we will work to unify that documentation so that it reflects our plans for V6.

  • The legacy Jetty installer for Windows has been updated with a recent 12.1 release. We will continue to maintain that until the V6 release (which isn’t scheduled yet, but could be as soon as early next year).