Today we issued a press release announcing the 1.0 release of Eclipse Higgins. You can download the brand spanking new release from the project download site.
Higgins is one of those Eclipse projects that has been quietly building a community but outside the core Eclipse community, ie. the identity management community. The vision of Higgins is to create a framework designed to integrate identity, profile and social relationship information across multiple sites, applications and devices. In other words they want to make it easier for developers and end users to manage their identity in the world of unlimited username/password combinations you need to exist on the Internet.
When I first heard about Higgins I was impressed with the ambition. I use to work for a security company in the identity space so I had an appreciation for the size of the task and more importantly the ‘politics’ of getting the different players to participate in such an initiative.
Therefore, it is wonderful to see the progress Higgins has made. A 1.0 release is a great milestone but what is even more impressive is that the community includes the big guys in the identity space – Novell, IBM, CA, Oracle, Serena and yes even Google. Microsoft has also been very supportive of the effort. A tip of the hat to Paul Trevithick and Mary Ruddy the Higgins co-project leaders. It is a great achievement.
