It’s Only Software

I write this announcement with a lot of excitement and a great sigh of relief. It was about a year ago when I was approached by Packt Publishing, who was interested in my introduction to Spring Security, and somehow got the idea that I could write. They recognized that there was no published book focusing on Spring Security (as I have often noted myself), and wondered if I would be interested in writing a book on the subject. For me, the idea really clicked, and I jumped on the opportunity to write a book about a subject that I had already had some significant exposure to, and a desire to explore further.

Fast-forward one year, and the final 400+ page book is now available on Amazon or from other online sources, as both a printed book and eBook (eBook available from Packt). I’ve put together a web site with more information about the book at www.springsecuritybook.com – there, you’ll find a rough idea of what the book covers, what it is (and isn’t), and where you can buy it or get more information.

This has been an enormously interesting research project for me, and the culmination of hundreds (probably thousands) of hours of night and weekend work, completed in addition to a demanding full-time job and family.

In a quick list of bullet points, we cover:

• Overall Spring Security architecture, at both a high and low level
• Implementation of all major Spring Security features, including:
  • JDBC-backed authentication
  • Method security with annotations and pointcuts
  • Session fixation protection
  • Concurrent session control
  • Password hashing
  • Access control lists (ACLs)
• Integration of Spring Security with external authentication providers, including:
  • OpenID
  • LDAP
  • CAS
  • Client certificates (X.509)
  • Kerberos
  • Microsoft Active Directory
• Full configuration of Spring Security using explicit Spring Bean declarations
• Many custom coding samples, including custom servlet filters, custom AuthenticationProviders, exception handlers, and much more.

All of these topics are covered both at a high level (how and why do they work), and a low level (how to configure, how to code, how to implement). It’s a great mix of theory and practice that I hope will be very effective for readers looking to implement Spring Security, or those who are already using it, but might not understand how it works.

I’m very excited to see the book in print, and believe it will have a big impact on the ability of users new to Spring Security to approach the framework with a better understanding of how it works. Additionally, for those users who will be doing sophisticated integrations or customizations based on the framework, there’s enough undocumented material and nuts-and-bolts discussions in the book to make it interesting for you as well.

Since most of my readers are techies, I hope to post interesting quantiative bits that I’ve been tracking along the way as I’ve coded, researched, diagrammed, revised, and all out slogged my way through gobs of code. More to come on this topic!

Please contact me if you have questions, comments, suggestions, or just congratulations

Book Info

Title: Spring Security 3

Publisher: Packt Publishing

Publication Date: May 29, 2010

Web Sites:

• http://www.springsecuritybook.com (My Personal Site)
• https://www.packtpub.com/spring-security-3/book (Official Site)

Pages: 420

ISBN: 978-1847199744

Amazon has made a lot of affiliates unhappy with their updates to the Product Advertising API (ex-Affiliate API). I first covered invoking this API a couple years ago – my, have things changed since then.

On August 15, 2009, Amazon will be requiring all affiliates using the Product Advertising API to digitally sign their API requests. Previously, calls to the web service required only the AWS Access Key ID. Now, affiliates are required to sign the requests with a private key (and supply the AWS Access Key ID!) in order for the request to be accepted.

Unfortunately, many affiliates feel that Amazon has really botched this transition. Very little documentation is available on how to sign requests, and the majority of the responses in the affiliate community forum are unanswered by Amazon staff. Additional bad news for Java users is that Amazon has apparently dropped their Java library (Amazon A2S), which used to nicely abstract the ugliness of making requests to the web service.

In this tutorial, we’ll implement an Amazon Product Advertising API client using Apache Axis2 1.5, invoking the API’s SOAP methods. We’ll sign the requests using a PKCS 12 (.p12) file. Get some popcorn – this is a very long and involved process Continue reading “[Tutorial] Amazon SOAP Product Advertising API from Java – Including Signing of Requests with WS-Security”

I’ve seen these antipatterns over and over again, and I thought it was time to write about them to help any folks who are new to Log4J out there. Senior developers – please share this with your junior peers and save yourself the pain of refactoring later! I’m interested in common mistakes or points of confusion that you’ve seen as well.

Read on to get a quick tutorial, or reference to point your developers at…

Continue reading “5 Common Log4J Mistakes”

I decided to post this as a public safety announcement, since I (surprisingly) didn’t see this blogged elsewhere. I have, for many years now, used the free/open source PDFCreator software for simple PDF generation and testing.

I recently updated to the most recent version (0.9.7) of the software (now hosted at pdfforge.org), and have made an interesting discovery.

The software is bundled with a browser toolbar component that has behavior which I would consider malware or trojan-like behavior. The notable difference is that it redirects certain types of browser traffic to www.searchsettings.com, which is a linkbait/parking-type site.

In Firefox, I noticed an extension called “Search Settings 1.2″ which, once removed, killed this behavior. After more research, I saw that IE had 2 Add-Ins installed (these were also removed). I did some more digging, and that’s when things got interesting.

There is a SourceForge Bug 2607106 “Remove trojan from download!” filed against this project. There’s the report at SiteAdvisor on pdfforge.org hosting this malware. There’s the post from an angry user on the pdfforge.org message boards.

To clarify, there are other “free” PDF creation projects that are questionable at best. However, I always took PDFCreator (sf.net) as a legitimate open source project.

The PDFCreator Toolbar is apparently implemented using “mybrowserbar”. As per their terms of service, they indicate:

f) modify your Microsoft Internet Explorer and/or Mozilla Firefox browser settings for the default search engine, address bar search, “DNS error” page, “404 error” page, and new tab page to facilitate more informative responses as determined by The Toolbar;

mybrowserbar.com “Company Information” redirects to www.spigot.com, which claims to be “Coming in March 2009″. spigot.com is a proxied domain, so there’s no further information available.

I downloaded and investigated the source tarball for the PDFCreator project, and the source of the browser toolbar installer is nowhere to be found (indeed, the .exe included with the installer isn’t present). There’s a response from Philip, one of the developers, in the pdfforge.org forum which sheds a little light on the browser toolbar. I completely empathize with his desire to make some money from his open source work; however, I’d disagree that this is an appropriate approach, and at the very least, the toolbar install option should be more up-front about it.

It’s unfortunate to see a long-time, responsible open source project act this way, and I do hope it’s an honest mistake. I wanted to give people the heads-up who may not be aware of this.

This post is to expand on some of the thoughts I posted on the SpringSource Blog in response to Rod Johnson’s excellent description of the SpringSource business model and its commitment to development of open source software.

Now that SpringSource has shown an ability to crank out new product releases on a seemingly weekly basis, I wanted to reflect on where Spring is positioned in the Java open source community, and how open the Spring Core project is to work done by the public.

The hypothesis of my experiment occurred to me when I happened to be reviewing Spring JIRA assignments one day. I was curious whether, following the bug assignments, the majority of development on the “Spring Core” projects (including Spring MVC and what we would consider “classic Spring”) is performed solely by SpringSource employees.

I decided to go about verifying this and would like to present my findings. Note that this is a purely objective study of a particular widely used open source project, and shouldn’t be construed as an opinion on the findings.

Edit Sept 22, 2008 Please note that although the publishing of this post by freakish timing occurred less than 24 hours after the announcement by SpringSource, I want to be clear that this article was drafted and published before I was aware of this news. As such, please don’t misread this investigation as a “response” to the announcement.

Since SpringSource is obviously a private company, I determined the list of employees by consulting publicly available information sources. Anyone is welcome to refute the claims in this article.

I have no direct working relationship with anyone at SpringSource; however, to verify the facts cited in my study, I did email an advance copy of the article to Juergen Hoeller, Spring Project Lead. Juergen kindly took the time to review it and clarify a couple facts that I wasn’t able to discern through public information. Juergen has always been friendly and considerate in the dealings we’ve had through Spring JIRA or the Spring forums, and I appreciate the help!

Read on for the analysis…
Continue reading “How Open Source is Spring?: An Analytical Investigation”

Since I spend a lot of time working with Spring, one of the many blogs in my daily read list is the SpringSource Team Blog, both articles and comments. I have gotten really tired, however, of the constant SEO spammers hitting the SpringSource blog.

It’s unfortunate that with SpringSource’s multi-million dollar funding rounds ($15M raised this summer, and $10M previously raised), they can’t find the resources to upgrade their very dated WordPress install with one that is more spam resistant, nor has anyone from the company even responded publicly to the many calls for fixing this issue.