The latest Enterprise Tech Tip is written by Ron Monzillo and covers JSR 196, Java Authentication Service Provider Interface for Containers. The document goes thru detailed steps on how to write, install, and configure a simple SAM (server authentication module) but also how to have your application bind to it.

GlassFish v2 already supports the Servlet Container Profile for this JSR and community member Greg Luck has written (with the help of others) the Spnego implementation for SPNEGO and Kerberos to be used in GlassFish.

The Spnego Project provides a Kerberos-over-SPNEGO plugin for JSR 196-compliant application servers. These are security technologies which can support complex integration scenarios such as single-sign-on all the way from your operating system login to a remote web application.

Greg Luck recently announced that the project team has completed a 1.0 release. They're doing development and testing on GlassFish V2, but their code shouldn't contain anything GlassFish-specific (since they align to JSR 196). Once other app servers support this standard, they too will be able to use the Spnego plugin. For more info, see the project's User Guide and FAQ.

Greg (of Wotif.COM fame) has first working code for SPNEGO on GlassFish. SPENGO stands for "Simple and Protected GSSAPI Negotiation Mechanism" and it is used to discover what GSSAPI (like Kerberos) protocol can be used by peers for establishing security contexts... which means SSO. SPENGO is supported by Active Directory, Sun's Access Manager, IE, FireFox and many others. Greg decided that kerberos is cool, started looking into using it in GlassFish and discovered that GF does not yet do SPNEGO; the result was spnego.dev.java.net.

Thanks to Greg for this contribution (and also to Ron and others that helped him along the way!). I looked around and it seems that SPNEGO is supported in WebLogic Server and WebSphere, so this will be yet another feature that can no longer be used to separate open source from non-open source app servers; and we have a few more in the queue that we are sure you will like!