Java EE 8 introduces a new security API that standardizes application security across all Java EE 8 compliant application servers. The API includes standardized access to identity stores, which allow a uniform way of retrieving user credentials from a relational or LDAP database, as well as allowing us to implement access to custom identity stores. The new Java EE 8 API includes support for authentication mechanisms, allowing us to authenticate users in a standard way. Several authentication mechanisms are supported such as basic HTTP authentication, client certificates, HTML forms, and more.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Identity stores
- Authentication mechanisms