Five things I learned about SAML from studying a realistic example

I recently dug into execution traces of a saml-rails example app, looking for "points of interest" in the code. Here are five interesting things that I learned about SAML and how to integrate SAML into a realistic application.Note: The code snippets in this post are edited a little bit for brevity. For full source, click through to the links.1) The SAML auth request is complexWhen a web site wants to login a user with SAML, it sends an HTTP request that contains a specially encoded auth parameter. The auth parameter is a base64 encoding of an XML document. It's built using code that looks like this:.