The state of portable authentication for GlassFish, Payara, JBoss/WildFly, WebLogic and Liberty
Almost exactly 3 years ago I took an initial look at custom container authentication in Java EE . Java EE has a dedicated API for this called JASPIC. Even though JASPIC was a mandatory part of Java EE, support at the time was not really good. In this article we'll take a look at where things were and how things are in the current crop of servers in 2015. To begin with, there were a number of spec omissions in JASPIC 1.0 (Java EE 6). The biggest one was that in order to register a server authentication module (SAM) an application ID had to be provided. This ID could not be obtained in a portable way. The JASPIC 1.1 MR rectified this . Other spec omissions concerned JASPIC being silent about what would need to happen with respect to HttpServletRequest#login and HttpServletRequest#logout, and with forward and includes done from a SAM. The JASPIC 1.1 MR rectified these omissions too . With respect to the actual behaviour there were a large number of very serious problems. Most