Currently, if you use PicketLink as your IdP, you get stuck with this HTML form based response when logging in successfully. This form needs to be posted back to the SP. It would be ideal if I could invoke a REST API to create the necessary SAML token against the IdP and use that to authenticate in to the SP. This would tie in very nicely with PLINK-165 which allows for the consumption of that SAML token via REST APIs with the Authorization HTTP header.

Currently, it's unclear how one would parse the FORM response from the IdP in to a SAML token.