Sunday, February 12, 2006

JAAS in the Enterprise @ JAVA DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL

JAAS in the Enterprise @ JAVA DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL: "JAAS in the Enterprise
An integration proposal

By: Raymond K. Ng; Ganesh Kirti
Jan. 30, 2006 12:00 PM

Since 2001 when Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS) was formally included in the Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) 1.3 platform specification, the J2EE community has been grappling with the issue of JAAS/J2EE integration. On the surface, JAAS seems to be an excellent complement to J2EE: JAAS defines a pluggable Application Programming Interface (API) for authentication modules and a fine-grained Subject-based authorization model, which are both lacking in the existing J2EE security model. Since JAAS is officially part of the J2EE platform specification, it's not unreasonable to expect that you can now leverage the JAAS framework to build portable enterprise applications that have advanced authentication and authorization requirements. Unfortunately, any Java architects or developers who go down this path for their applications will soon be confronted with the harsh reality: Instead of finding a landscape defined by an unified integration architecture, they'll discover a landscape littered with incompatible vendor-specific APIs and frameworks."

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