Differences in Protected Resources

Web agents are capable of protecting resources that can be hosted on the web or proxy servers on which they are installed. This protection includes any resource that can be represented as a uniform resource identifier (URI) available on the protected server. Such a protected URI can be resolved by the server to static content files such as HTML files or dynamic content generation programs such as CGI scripts or servlets hosted by an embedded servlet engine. In other words, before a request is evaluated by the web or proxy server, the web agent can evaluate the necessary credentials of a user and can allow or deny access for the requested resource. Once the request is granted access to the resource, it can be processed internally by the web or proxy server as applicable. In other words, the web agent uses the request URL to enforce all policy decisions regardless of what that URL maps to internally in the web server. In cases where the request URL maps to a servlet which in turn invokes other servlets or JSPs, the web agent will not intercept these subsequent resource requests unless such invocation involves a client-side redirect.

A J2EE agent is capable of protecting web and enterprise applications hosted by the application or portal server on which it is installed. These applications may include resources such as HTML pages, servlets, JSP, and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB). Apart from these resources, any resource that can be accessed as a URI within a protected web application can also be secured by such agents. For example, images that are packaged within a web application can also be protected by the J2EE Policy Agent. These agents allow the evaluation of J2EE policies and can also enforce Access Manager based URL policies like a web agent on the resources being requested by the user. Minimally the enforcement is done at the outermost requested URL, but can also be done on any intermediate URLs being chained to this resource on most application servers.