15.3. Authentication

Seam Security provides Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS) based authorization features, providing a robust and highly configurable API for handling user authentication. If your authentication needs are not this complex, Seam also offers a simplified authentication method.

15.3.1. Configuring an Authenticator component

Note

If you use Seam's Identity Management features, you can skip this section — it is not necessary to create an authenticator component.
Seam's simplified authentication method uses a built-in JAAS login module (SeamLoginModule) to delegate authentication to one of your own Seam components. (This module requires no additional configuration files, and comes pre-configured within Seam.) With this, you can write an authentication method with the entity classes provided by your own application, or authenticate through another third-party provider. Configuring this simplified authentication requires the identity component to be configured in components.xml 
<components xmlns="http://jboss.com/products/seam/components" 
            xmlns:core="http://jboss.com/products/seam/core" 
            xmlns:security="http://jboss.com/products/seam/security" 
            xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
            xsi:schemaLocation= 
              "http://jboss.com/products/seam/components 
               http://jboss.com/products/seam/components-2.2.xsd 
               http://jboss.com/products/seam/security 
               http://jboss.com/products/seam/security-2.2.xsd">

<security:identity authenticate-method="#{authenticator.authenticate}"/>

</components>
#{authenticator.authenticate} is a method binding that indicates the authenticate method of the authenticator component will be used to authenticate the user.