How we handled ADF Security

Well. we're handling it, alright.

One of the things you must take into account is that developing in JDeveloper with integrated WLS has advantages, but it can be living hell when you try to move application to standalone server. I guess development environment gives you some advantages by setting some things where they should be so you can focus on programming itself. And that is cool. What is not cool is that some of the details remain hidden from you, so you can easily overlook them.

As for ADF Security and moving it to other environments, I found this very helpfull. Andrejus gives you nice step-by-step introduction, with pointing to relevant articles and tutorials from Oracle. But...

What wasn't said, or maybe I have missed it, was that you have to put adf-config.xml file on the classpath. If you download Andrejus' example, when you make a deloyment EAR you will see that there is a directory adf with META-INF directory that has connections.xml and, most important, adf-config.xml

adf-config.xml has few things you need for using ADF Security.


Of course, you can find enough documentation on this.

And this is put to our classpath by using adf-loc.jar that is in the lib directory of EAR. This jar contains only META-INF with manifest file containing this

Manifest-Version: 1.0
Class-Path: ../adf


So that does the trick.

But, now what?

First, I don't like this restarting server part. It means that changing policies during production requires migration process and restarting server, which I think no one likes. I guess that integrating previous Oracle technologies with WLS has just begun, this has to be corrected ASAP.

Second, I guess there aren't many people whith knowledge from both worlds (Oracle and BEA), which will probably change in time. Until then, we have to handle things like this.

Anyway, I would like to thank Andrejus for his article and his lovely example that showed me the light.

Cheers!