Supported Platforms
The Jasig Central Authentication Service is designed to run on any Java 1.5 or higher virtual machine, and in any container that supports the Servlet 2.4 or higher specification. Its been tested on the Sun Java 1.5 and 1.6 JVMs, as well as in the Tomcat, Jetty, and JBoss containers.
No service would be useful if there wasn't a large quantity of clients available to ease integration. Jasig officially supports Java, .NET, PHP, and Apache module clients. The community has contributed clients for languages ranging from Cold Fusion, Ruby, and Perl to IIS, PAM, and PL/SQL. Official CAS support is also included in SpringSource's Spring Security project as well as Jasig's uPortal project. Finally, the Java client includes modules to ease integration with Atlassian's Confluence and JIRA.
The community has also contributed their expertise in "CASifying" a wide range of applications including Joomia, OpenCms, FishEye & Crucible, Roller, Liferay, Wordpress, and Zimbra.
Features
CAS is a full-featured enterprise single sign on service that has been deployed at universities, non-profits, non-government organizations, governments, small businesses, and large corporations.
CAS supports the CAS1 and CAS2 protocols allowing for simple single sign on, as well as proxy authentication. The addition of SAML 1.1 allows for the exchange of attributes between the CAS server and CAS clients. Partial SAML2 support allows for integration with Google Apps for Education, allowing universities that have deployed CAS to take advantage of institutional GMail.
CAS can easily integrate with any organizations authentication system. Out of the box, CAS includes authentication support for LDAP (including Active Directory), databases, SPNEGO/NTLM, X.509 certificates, container, and RADIUS. It also includes an extensive plugin API to easily write your own authentication support.
For the enterprise-minded, CAS includes multiple options for deploying in a clustered environment. Deployers can choose from BerkeleyDB, JBossCache, Memcacache, or a database storage system for clustering. Other important enterprise features include the ability to audit who is accessing which service, as well as gathering statistics about each server.
Finally, CAS has been designed from the ground up using current best practices to be an extensible platform with well-defined plugin APIs based on community use cases. In addition, its build using "de facto" standard libraries including Spring, Maven2, Person Directory, JSPs, and more meaning your skills carry from CAS to your applications, and vice versa.