Day: 2 June 2009

Spring Security (originally ACEGI) does not seem to work out of the box with Java EE security (see here). I guess the reason is clear, namely that the people from Spring don't want you to be tied into Java EE and that makes sense because Spring something that you can use without Java EE. But instead of having to learn something new and instead of having to configure my security in a non-standard way, I wanted a way to ensure my services are only called by someone with the right authorization, exactly when they are deployed in a Java EE environment. Since a standard web application running in a Java EE container can be configured to have security, I expected to be able to configure Spring to use the web request to check the Principal for its security roles before calling a service, but that isn't possible. So, I set to work to quickly create a little library to help me out. The first step was to implement a Filter in the web application so that it could intercept every call and insert the web request (containing the Principal) into a ThreadLocal variable. The idea was that the ThreadLocal variable could then be used further up the call stack to query the security roles of the authenticated user. The filter implementation looks like this:     public void doFilter(             ServletRequest request,             ServletResponse response,             FilterChain chain)             throws IOException, ServletException {          //set the request in the security…

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