Integrate Spring Security with ZK

Author
Ian Tsai, Engineer, Potix Corporation

Date
March 04, 2013

Version
ZK 6.5.X, Spring Security 3.1.2

This paragraph is under construction.

Introduction

Spring Security is a common solution for developer to serve security needs in a Java web application, it is widely used and is a proven technology. However, due to its nature to protect resources by pattern matching through URL, it's not that obvious for application developer to delegate Spring Security with general amount of ajax frameworks which use Json format in form to structure meta-information.

So in this article, I'll introduce how to integrate Spring Security with ZK seamlessly by going through the construction of a simple demo application(An article publish and editing system).

Resources to Download

I use Git as my source control and has stored my code at Github, you can check out the demo project from here.

If you are more comfortable to war format, you can get the archived project here.

The project is based on Maven, if you want to try different version of ZK or Spring, please change the version number in pom.xml

Demo Application Details

This demo application is a simple article publish and edit system which allows three kinds of user to access: user with role ROLE_USER, user with role ROLE_EDITOR and the anonymous user with default reserved role IS_AUTHENTICATED_ANONYMOUSLY.

• Anonymous user can visit the homepage which contains article list, and they can view an article's content by clicking it's link in homepage.
• User with role ROLE_USER is allowed to post new article and edit their own articles.
• User with role ROLE_EDITOR is most powerful user who is able to edit and delete any article.

This article will based on the implementation requirements of this application to demonstrate the integration of Spring Security and ZK.

Spring Security Configuration

First, let's see how to configure our project. To use Spring Security, we have to add some listener and filter declarations in web.xml:

	<context-param>
		<param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
		<param-value>
			/WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml 
			/WEB-INF/applicationContext-security.xml
		</param-value>
	</context-param>
	<listener>
		<listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
	</listener>
	<listener>
		<listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.request.RequestContextListener</listener-class>
	</listener>
	<listener>
		<listener-class>org.springframework.security.web.session.HttpSessionEventPublisher</listener-class>
	</listener>
	<filter><!-- the filter-name must be preserved,  do not change it! -->
		<filter-name>springSecurityFilterChain</filter-name>
		<filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.DelegatingFilterProxy</filter-class>
	</filter>
	<filter-mapping>
		<filter-name>springSecurityFilterChain</filter-name>
		<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
	</filter-mapping>

As you can see, despite those ordinary Spring Context Listeners(RequestContextListener and ContextLoaderListener), we declared HttpSessionEventPublisher and springSecurityFilterChain for Spring Security. Here the HttpSessionEventPublisher is optional and it is designed for Spring Security to do detailed concurrent session control, the springSecurityFilterChain is the main hook for all Spring Security's functionality to the application, it's required and must be named springSecurityFilterChain.

applicationContext-security.xml

Here in this project, I separated Spring's ApplicationContext.xml to two files, the original ApplicationContext.xml is for backend bean and sevice bean declarations, and the additional applicationContext-security.xml is for Spring Security's configuration only.

In applicationContext-security.xml, there are two major elements we have to setup, the <http> element and the <authentication-manager> element.

Comments

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