The entire spec, yes, is big, but the part you actually need is not that complicated. I implemented the IdP for the new york times (there's quite a bit of third

The entire spec, yes, is big, but the part you actually need is not that complicated. I implemented the IdP for the new york times (there's quite a bit of third party shit plugged into the nytimes.com web experience that we wanted to be transparent to users) in a few weeks as I recall, and I'm not some coding super-genius. (It was kinda hacktified and minimalistic, but it worked at scale. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) Most of our counter-parties were up and running in a week or so. Compared to the abysmal quagmire that was our ecommerce code, SAML implementation was a total milk run.