welcome

Thank you for purchasing the MEAP for OpenID Connect in Action. In this book you will learn everything you need to know about OpenID Connect, and we don’t expect you to know about anything other than OpenID Connect is being used for login.

The sample applications in the book use Java, React, and React Native. So, having some working knowledge of those technologies will be helpful, but is not a must. If you are comfortable with any programming language and know the basics of JavaScript, and have a solid understanding of how the web works in general, you are all set to get started. Appendix A and B of the book help you get a jumpstart with React and React Native respectively.

When I joined WSO2 in 2007, my first task was to implement OpenID support to the open source Identity Server, which was called Identity Solution those days. Couple of years later, in 2009, we had a large-scale deployment of Identity Server as an OpenID provider in Saudi Arabia over a 4 million user base. That was my first hands on experience with OpenID.

OpenID was the predecessor of OpenID Connect. 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 the OpenID Connect support to the Identity Server.