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Overview

J2EE and Web services applications are made up of components that can be deployed into different containers. These components are used to build a multi-tier enterprise application. Security for components is provided by their containers. A container provides two kinds of security: declarative and programmatic security.

Declarative security expresses an application's security structure, including security roles, access control, and authentication requirements, in a form external to the application (in a deployment descriptor). Programmatic security is embedded in an application and is used to make security decisions. Programmatic security is useful when declarative security alone is not sufficient to express the security model of an application.

J2EE applications consist of components that can contain both protected and unprotected resources. Often, you need to protect resources to ensure that only authorized users have access. Authorization provides controlled access to protected resources. Authorization is based on identification and authentication. Identification is a process that enables recognition of an entity by a system, and authentication is a process that verifies the identity of a user, device, or other entity in a computer system, usually as a prerequisite to allowing access to resources in a system.

Authorization and authentication are not required for an entity to access unprotected resources. Accessing a resource without authentication is referred to as unauthenticated or anonymous access.

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