[wildfly-dev] Subsystem Hierarchy

[Josef Cacek]

Hi Darran,

thank you for raising this discussion. We've heard from users/customers about complexity of WildFly/EAP management tools and it's one of the reasons why we prefer to split the hierarchy into logical groups instead of using the flat structure. We would also like to hear opinion of the UX team.

What was not mentioned before is the fact that one possible grouping is already present in the XSD of the Elytron subsystem:
- security-properties
- provider-loaders
- security-domains
- security-realms
- credential-security-factories
- mappers
- http
- sasl
- tls
- dir-contexts

IMO the domain model doesn't need to copy the XSD, but it could be a good starting point in the discussion.

Introducing the deeper hierarchy in the model would also allow to describe what each group ("component" in your sample) is responsible for and also how it relates to other groups.

The objection, that the experienced administrators would need to write longer commands is not so important from our point of view. For us seems much more important the quick boot into the configuration for administrators, which meets the Elytron subsystem for the first time.

The flat model solution disallows to work with CLI with the way like: "I know I need some realm, but don't know which exactly". Current flat solution is not able to display all available security-realm. 

Thanks,

-- Josef

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Darran Lofthouse" <darran.lofthouse at jboss.com>
> To: "WildFly Dev" <wildfly-dev at lists.jboss.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2016 4:47:06 PM
> Subject: [wildfly-dev] Subsystem Hierarchy
> 
> I have received the following request regarding the hierarchy of the
> Elytron subystem so just wanted to get some additional opinions: -
> 
> https://issues.jboss.org/browse/WFLY-7190
> 
> The Elytron subsystem is implemented by having a number of different
> capabilities that are then chained together in the model to expose four
> / five capabilities that are then used across the application server to
> access security related services.
> 
> https://github.com/wildfly-security-incubator/wildfly-capabilities/tree/elytron_integration/org/wildfly/security
> 
> The reason for following the capability approach along with a component
> assembly approach to assembling the configuration is so that we are
> ready for other subsystems to be added to the server potentially
> providing their own implementations of these capabilities.
> 
> For our capabilities we have one or more resource definitions making it
> possible to configure different implementations of the capabilities
> whilst having the configuration fully described in the model unlike the
> previous map approach for login modules.
> 
> So the general problem is how should an administrator be able to see the
> resources by type.
> 
> Within the admin console Claudio it looking at a tabbed interface where
> different tabs can contain different resources so that seems to be
> reasonably covered.
> 
> Within the CLI however an administrator is just presented by all
> resource types within the subsystem when they use tab completion.
> 
> One option could be for us to introduce an arbitrary layer in the
> subsystem and group our resources, e.g.
> 
>    /subsystem=elytron/component=name-rewriter/
>    /subsystem=elytron/component=security-realm/
> 
> But before taking that approach it feels as though this information is
> already there and there are possibly some other alternatives we could
> consider.
> 
> Firstly I wonder if some of the read-* operations could have an
> opportunity to take into account capabilities of child resources to
> offer a filtered view?
> 
> Another possible option could be CLI commands e.g. add-name-rewriter,
> add-security-realm - not sure if that would be one way to give a better
> user experience.
> 
> Anyway just some random thoughts for the moment but wanted to open this
> up before jumping immediately to the artificial hierarchy solution.
> 
> Regards,
> Darran Lofthouse.
> 
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