Progammatic Authentication and Declarative Authorization

[Srivastava Praveen]

Can we develop an application where we can use programmatic authentication that means we develop login page and ejb to implement authentication. And declarative authorization that means use deployment descriptor for role information and authorization.

Please suggest.

- Praveen

[Wirianto Djunaidi]

The answer is yes you can. More important question is would you want to?

[Srivastava Praveen]

I want my login page as requirement may be to use some more information to authenticate the user apart from userid and password. For example, if user fails to login twice, system may ask to provide some information for login. In form based declarative authentication, I can have only userid and password.

I want declarative authentication because currently application is in initial stage and will grow in future to add more roles. So if we have declarative authorization, then code change will not be required.

Please suggest.

- Praveen

[Ulf Dittmer]

In my experience, declarative security only works for the most simple uses cases. In all non-trivial applications I've found it much too limiting. It's not realistically possible (or desirable) to differentiate rights and privileges by URL. In many cases, having more (or different) rights means being able to view more (or different) data, not being able to access additional URLs (although that, too, can happen).

[ray livia]

You could try with JAAS. I did some reading on this. JAAS provide good support on both programmatic custom and container mananged. I did not go very deep into it. Please let me know if any wrong.

[Farbod H Foomany]

Hi,
Yes what you are saying really makes sense.
You can authenticate for example using biometrics, and fetch the roles from a repository for example, LDAP and you will have the roles with you.
You can authorize as normal then.