appswitcher-server

appswitcher-server renders a simple web page containing icon-based hyperlinks to common web applications used in your (corporate) environment. The static page is designed to be embedded (e.g. using an iframe) into your web applications to provide your users with a quick way to switch between these applications.

appswitcher-server was heavily inspired by Google's App Bar, which provides a quick way to switch between Google Apps.

At it@M we use appswitcher-server internally to offer our customers a quick way to switch between internal or external web applications like the social intranet "WiLMA", the phone book and many other web applications:

The web page of appswitcher-server will be embedded (mostly by using an iframe) into the app bar of our web applications (= client applications):

If you are using Vue.js/Vuetify or Vaadin Flow to build your frontends, there are already pre-built components which allow integrating the iframe very quickly:

• https://github.com/it-at-m/appswitcher-vue
• https://github.com/it-at-m/appswitcher-vaadin

Features

Custom applications

Applications can be freely configured by adding them to the apps map in application.yml, for example:

appswitcher.apps:
  github: # unique key
    display-name: GitHub
    url: https://github.com/it-at-m
    image-url: https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/58515289?s=144&v=4

Property	Description
display-name	Name of the application
url	URL of the application, will be used for the hyperlink
image-url	URL for the applications image/icon. The image should be quadratic, size should be between 48x48 and 144x144 pixels.

Tags

Applications can be assigned (multiple) tags. For example, you could use tags to distinguish applications by their application domain like finance, development, customer-relations and so on.

appswitcher.apps:
  github:
    display-name: GitHub
    url: https://github.com/it-at-m
    image-url: https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/58515289?s=144&v=4
    tags:
      - development

Client applications (= applications that embed the appswitcher server web page) can request specific tags by using the query parameter tags. For example, if you embed the appswitcher in a development centric web application, the client application could request only apps tagged with development by using the following url as IFrame src:

https://appswitcher.mycompany.org?tags=development

Client applications can also request multiple tags (e.g. ?tags=development,finance). This way, an application will be included if it has any of the requested tags.

If a client application does not specify any tags, by default only applications tagged as global will be included.

Keycloak integration

If you are using Keycloak with OpenID for access management and single sign-on in your environment, you can also add (multiple) client ID(s) to applications that use Keycloak/OpenID for access management.

appswitcher.apps:
  finance:
    display-name: Finance Reports
    url: https://finance.mycompany.com
    image-url: https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/58515289?s=144&v=4
    client-id:
      - finance

With this configuration, an icon-based hyperlink to the "Finance Reports" web application will only be included if the current user's access token claim audience contains the client id (and the tags match the requested tags). This is based on the Audience Support in Keycloak.

When using the Keycloak integration you can only include web applications that the current user has a permission to access.

Keycloak integration is disabled by default. When enabled, appswitcher-server acts as an OpenID client application to retrieve a user's access token.

This integration works best if your user's operating system propagates a session to the browser and therefore Keycloak, for example Kerberos on Windows.

For the Keycloak integration to work properly, there are a few caveats (IFrame and cookies, X-Frame-Options) to be aware of. See the wiki page for more details.

Configuration

appswitcher-server is a Spring Boot application and can therefore be configured using the Spring environment abstraction.

Environment variable	System/Spring property	Description	Default value
SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE	spring.profiles.active	Comma seperated list of Spring profiles to activate (e.g. keycloak)
APPSWITCHER_APPS	appswitcher.apps	Map with applications (see Features)

Keycloak integration

Keycloak integration can be enabled by enabling the Spring profile keycloak (see SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE in Configuration).

Environment variable	System/Spring property	Description	Default value
APPSWITCHER_KEYCLOAK_CLIENT_ID	appswitcher.keycloak.clientId	Client ID of the appswitcher itself.
APPSWITCHER_KEYCLOAK_CLIENT_SECRET	appswitcher.keycloak.client-secret	Client secret.
APPSWITCHER_KEYCLOAK_ISSUER_URI	appswitcher.keycloak.issuer-uri	Issuer uri (e.g. 'https://keycloak.mycompany.org/auth/realms/myrealm')
APPSWITCHER_KEYCLOAK_JWK_SET_URI	appswitcher.keycloak.jwk-set-uri	JWK set uri (e.g. 'https://keycloak.mycompany.org/auth/realms/myrealm/protocol/openid-connect/certs'
APPSWITCHER_KEYCLOAK_SCOPES	appswitcher.keycloak.scopes	Comma-seperated list of requested scopes (e.g. 'openid,roles').
APPSWITCHER_KEYCLOAK_SSO_SESSION_MAX	appswitcher.keycloak.sso-session-max	Maximum time in seconds before keycloak expires the sso sessions (e.g. '36000' for 10 hours).

Using

Docker

You can use the official container image itatm/appswitcher-server. To provide your custom Applications create a custom application.yml containing your applications under the key appswitcher.apps.* and mount the file as a volume at /deployments/config/application.yaml.

Kubernetes

If you want to deploy appswitcher-server on a Kubernetes cluster, you can use the official Helm chart.

Build & Development

This project is built with technologies we use in our projects:

• Java
• Maven
• Spring Boot

Build:

mvn clean install

Run:

mvn spring-boot:run -Dspring-boot.run.profiles=demo

Visit http://localhost:8080 to see the generated application link list with the demo applications.

Contributing

Contributions are what make the open source community such an amazing place to learn, inspire, and create. Any contributions you make are greatly appreciated.

If you have a suggestion that would make this better, please open an issue with the tag "enhancement", fork the repo and create a pull request. You can also simply open an issue with the tag "enhancement". Don't forget to give the project a star! Thanks again!

1. Open an issue with the tag "enhancement"
2. Fork the Project
3. Create your Feature Branch (git checkout -b feature/AmazingFeature)
4. Commit your Changes (git commit -m 'Add some AmazingFeature')
5. Push to the Branch (git push origin feature/AmazingFeature)
6. Open a Pull Request

We use itm-java-codeformat, so please make sure to apply the correct code format for your contributions.

License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE file for more information.

Contact

it@M - opensource@muenchen.de