Implementing container authentication in Java EE with JASPIC
This article takes a look at the state of security support in Java EE 6, with a focus on applications that wish to do their own authentication and the usage of the JASPI/JASPIC/JSR 196 API. Update: the further reading section has been moved to my ZEEF page about JASPIC . This contains links to articles, background, questions and answers, and more. Declarative security is easy In Java EE it has always been relatively straightforward to specify to which resources security constraints should be applied. For web resources (Servlets, JSP pages, etc) there is the <security-constraint> element in web.xml, while for EJB beans there's the @RolesAllowed annotation. Via this so called 'declarative security' the programmer can specify that only a user having the given roles is allowed access to the protected web resource, or may invoke methods on the protected bean. The declarative model has a programmatic counterpart via methods like HttpServletRequest#isUserInR