[higgins-dev] Do we need a less platform dependent context provider regi

["Paul Trevithick" <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greg and Jim,

I just moved the registry-related text to its own page
http://spwiki.editme.com/ContextProviderRegistry and linked to it from the
main IdAS page here: http://spwiki.editme.com/IdentityAttributeService. 

The new page describes the current and proposed Context Provider
registration approaches. In addition to different functionality/semantics,
there is also a difference in technologies.

It occurs to me that if we're going to go to the trouble of replacing the
current provider registry, perhaps we should move in the direction of
something that is less platform dependent. 

The current code is tightly bound to the Eclipse/OSGI plug-in runtime. The
new proposal is tightly bound to Java and java.security.provider. Maybe we
should use this opportunity move to a more abstract services description. If
so, this might allow an implementation of the service on the Eclipse
platform that uses Eclipse/OSGI plugins, and on other platforms using
java.security.provider, and yet on Linux/C platforms using something
equivalent. 

-Paul