Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v2.1.1 Developer's Guide

ACC Security

The ACC determines when authentication is needed. This typically occurs when the client refers to an EJB component or when annotations in the client's main class trigger injection which, in turn, requires contact with the Enterprise Server's naming service. To authenticate the end user, the ACC prompts for any required information, such as a username and password. The ACC itself provides a very simple dialog box to prompt for and read these values.

The ACC integrates with the Enterprise Server’s authentication system. It also supports SSL (Secure Socket Layer)/IIOP if configured and when necessary; see Using RMI/IIOP Over SSL.

You can provide an alternate implementation to gather authentication information, tailored to the needs of the application client. To do so, include the class to perform these duties in the application client and identify the fully-qualified name of this class in the callback-handler element of the application-client.xml descriptor for the client. The ACC uses this class instead of its default class for asking for and reading the authentication information. The class must implement the javax.security.auth.callback.CallbackHandler interface. See the Java EE specification, section 9.2, Application Clients: Security, for more details.

Application clients can use Programmatic Login.

For more information about security for application clients, see the Java EE 5 Specification, Section EE.9.7, “Java EE Application Client XML Schema.”