[ajug-members] J2EE Web User Authentication

[Titus Barik]

Hi all,

I'm a trying to find a clean way to do user authentication with Resin 
and struts. A good start appeared to be the use of the JDBCAuthenticator 
provided by Resin:

http://www.caucho.com/resin-3.0/security/authentication.xtp

My database store provides the user ID, username, first name, last name, 
and password in one table, and the roles in another.

After logging in, one can get the username and the role information by 
using the getUserPrinciple call. But because of the nature of the 
authenticator, there is no way to get any of the other properties.

What is a good way to deal with this? One thought was to write my own 
authenticator. On a successful authentication, it would add a user 
business object to the web session context, and this object would be 
used throughout the application instead of UserPrinciple. But perhaps 
there's something better than this that I don't know about.

Any advice is appreciated.

Regards,

-- 
Titus Barik <titus at barik.net>