welcome

Thank you for purchasing the MEAP for OpenID Connect in Action. Although most people don’t realize it (developers excepted), every day we all use OpenID Connect to log in worldwide. Developers use OpenID Connect to secure access to all types of applications. In this book you will learn everything you need to know about OpenID Connect so you can implement it.

Over time, I’ve seen more and more applications adding support for OpenID Connect, which is easily overtaking its most successful predecessor, SAML 2.0. Since 2016, most applications developed globally use OpenID Connect for login.

You may have heard of OpenID, which was OpenID Connect’s predecessor. When I joined WSO2 in 2007, my first task was to implement OpenID support for the open-source Identity Server, which was called Identity Solution in those days. A few years later, in 2009, we completed a large-scale deployment of Identity Server as an OpenID provider in Saudi Arabia with a user base of 4 million. That was my first hands-on experience with OpenID. Later, I also implemented OAuth 1.0 support, and some part of the OAuth 2.0 support in the Identity Server product. When OpenID Connect became mainstream, we added OpenID Connect support to the Identity Server.