WSO2 Balana documentation

Question

I'm new to Java and was thinking of starting some project would be a good experience to learn. I need to build some authentication and authorization capabilities in the application and was thinking about XACML Balana for authorization.

Question 1 : where can I find documentation for Balana as in the WSO2 SVN itself the documentation directory is empty and although there are some useful information in XACMLinfo yet something like a JavaDoc would be useful for my level.

Question 2 : I started with the samples and when I tried to replicate I couldn't pinpoint how can I create the policy and I grasped that I can put that as a file yet how do I define the location of that file in the code

Question 3 : for the PEP side do I need to rely on something like openAZ or that is if I want a more sophisticated application since I saw in the sample programs it is possible to send requests and receive responses as XML.

sorry for the might be not very polished questions but any answer would be a great help for putting a new programmer get on the right track.

Answer 1

I have a similar problem for question 1. All the directives to the folders on maven point to poms. Never had any luck getting the poms to download. I either have to put more effort into using maven or I'm missing something.

For question 2:
You can change a system property prior to initializing your balana instance so that balana looks in a particular location for the policy store. link This is ./resources/ by default.

System.setProperty(FileBasedPolicyFinderModule.POLICY_DIR_PROPERTY, policyDirectoryLocation);

Question 3:
No, you don't have to use openAZ. In fact the k-market sample from balana actually just constructs the xml from strings in code. For simplicity and making life easier, this is a quick and dirty way to get the structure of the request while being able to substitute in values for attributes from code. If you find you're needing more flexibility, you can wrap that logic into how it appends bits of string into the request string. link