Header based stateless token authentication for JAX-RS
Authentication is a topic that comes up often for web applications. The Java EE spec supports authentication for those via the Servlet and JASPIC specs, but doesn't say too much about how to authenticate for JAX-RS. Luckily JAX-RS is simply layered on top of Servlets, and one can therefore just use JASPIC's authentication modules for the Servlet Container Profile. There's thus not really a need for a separate REST profile, as there is for SOAP web services. While using the same basic technologies as authentication modules for web applications, the requirements for modules that are to be used for JAX-RS are a bit different. JAX-RS is often used to implement an API that is used by scripts. Such scripts typically do not engage into an authentication dialog with the server, i.e. it's rare for an API to redirect to a form asking for credentials, let alone asking to log-in with a social provider. An even more fundamental difference is that in web apps it's common...