Say thanks to Mark

Mark Baker is one of the Canadians in my list of "FIELDING HAS A POSSE". You can find his name in many old discusses about "REST VS SOAP" topics at various blogs and Yahoo SOA and REST discussion groups. Maybe he is a little tired of that now. But I agree that "the war really has been won" for him. He had already broadcast the ideas to many like me. And now I try to tell others the message when I am learning it. Thank you, Mark.

"Grid computing zone is being retired"

Thank you for your continued interest in grid computing and for looking to developerWorks to keep you up to date. The Grid computing zone is no longer being updated because the zone is being discontinued.

from IBM developerWorks

Slides for TRLabs SOA workshop

The TRLabs just organized a successful workshop on SOA. I gave a short presentation about REST there. Here is the slides.

Jetty 6 authentication by configuration XML without web.xml

I spent about a week for porting of NetKernel 3.3 from Jetty 5 to Jetty 6. It is done and I am testing the non-blocking IO (NIO) of Jetty 6 together with asynchronous processing feature of NetKernel. I also figure out how to configure Jetty 6 security in the configuration XML file. From the Jetty document about Realm, the security of an application can be configured in web.xml. However, there is no web.xml in my case, when the request received by Jetty be handled by a specific handler, which will call another handler-like facility for processing. The solution for Jetty 5 does not work for Jetty 6 for this case, since the corresponding API's of org.mortbay.jetty.Server are removed. I got some hint from the document about how to configure security for embedded Jetty. However, it is still about a web application via class WebAppContext. Then I wondered if org.mortbay.jetty.security.SecurityHandler will help (it has an interesting name). Yes, it is. The hack is done with a longer XML file creating a HashUserRealm and a ConstraintMappings. See the details in the following snippet.

<Set name="handler">
<New id="Handlers"
class="org.mortbay.jetty.handler.HandlerCollection">
<Set name="handlers">
<Array type="org.mortbay.jetty.Handler">
<Item>
<New id="BackendSecurity"
class="org.mortbay.jetty.security.SecurityHandler" />
</Item>
<Item>
<New id="BackendNetkernel"
class="org.ten60.transport.jetty.HttpHandler" />
</Item>
</Array>
</Set>
</New>
</Set>
<!-- =========================================================== -->
<!-- Configure BackendSecurity                                   -->
<!-- Add a Realm and a ConstraintMappings to it. See             -->
<!-- http://docs.codehaus.org/display/JETTY/How+to+Configure+Security+with+Embedded+Jetty -->
<!-- =========================================================== -->
<Ref id="BackendSecurity">
<Set name="UserRealm">
<New class="org.mortbay.jetty.security.HashUserRealm">
<Set name="name">Test Realm</Set>
<Set name="config">
<SystemProperty name="bootloader.basepath"
default=".." />/etc/realm.properties</Set>
</New>
</Set>
<Set name="AuthMethod">DIGEST</Set>
<Set name="ConstraintMappings">
<Array type="org.mortbay.jetty.security.ConstraintMapping">
<Item>
<New id="BSConstraintMapping"
class="org.mortbay.jetty.security.ConstraintMapping">
<Set name="Constraint">
<New class="org.mortbay.jetty.security.Constraint">
<Set name="Name">allSite</Set>
<Set name="Roles">
<Array type="java.lang.String">
<Item>admin</Item>
</Array>
</Set>
<Set name="Authenticate">true</Set>
</New>
</Set>
<Set name="PathSpec">/</Set>
</New>
</Item>
</Array>
</Set>
</Ref>

NetKernel backend securing by using Jetty realm

NetKernel uses Jetty for HTTP transport. By default, it opens two port, one for services, and one for management. The fresh installation does not secure the management port, the backend. However, you can configure it to do that by using HTAccessHandler of Jetty as described in http://www.1060.org/forum/topic/265/2 . I encountered problems when doing like that on Window system. So I tried to using Realm of Jetty to do that, and it works. Here is the configuration file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<httpConfig>
<!--
*****************
Jetty HTTP Server
*****************
-->
<Configure class="org.mortbay.jetty.Server">
<!--
***********
Add Listeners
***********
-->
<!--Start addlisteners-->
<!--Add SocketListener with default port 1060-->
<Call name="addListener">
<Arg>
<New class="org.mortbay.http.SocketListener">
<Set name="Port">1060</Set>
<Set name="MinThreads">5</Set>
<Set name="MaxThreads">50</Set>
<Set name="MaxIdleTimeMs">30000</Set>
<Set name="LowResourcePersistTimeMs">5000</Set>
</New>
</Arg>
</Call>
<!--End addlisteners-->
<Call name="addRealm">
<Arg>
<New class="org.mortbay.http.HashUserRealm">
<Arg>Admin Realm</Arg>
<Put name="admin">yourpasshere</Put>
<Call name="addUserToRole">
<Arg>admin</Arg>
<Arg>server-administrator</Arg>
</Call>
</New>
</Arg>
</Call>
<!--
************
Add Server Contexts
************
-->
<!--Default context at root / -->
<Call name="addContext">
<Arg>/</Arg>
<Set name="realmName">Admin Realm</Set>
<Set name="authenticator">
<New class="org.mortbay.http.BasicAuthenticator" />
</Set>
<Call name="addHandler">
<Arg>
<New class="org.mortbay.http.handler.SecurityHandler" />
</Arg>
</Call>
<Call name="addSecurityConstraint">
<Arg>/</Arg>
<Arg>
<New class="org.mortbay.http.SecurityConstraint">
<Arg>Admin</Arg>
<Arg>server-administrator</Arg>
</New>
</Arg>
</Call>
<Call name="addHandler">
<Arg>
<New class="org.ten60.transport.jetty.HttpHandler">
<Set name="Name">BackendHTTPTransport</Set>
</New>
</Arg>
</Call>
</Call>
</Configure>
</httpConfig>

Jetty also provides HashUserRealm that reads a property file in which the user names and passwords can be specified.

The Web is Agreement

Wonderful work by Paul Downey.
Tower of WS-Babel, exactly.

The Day The Routers Died...

Via Stefan Tilkov via James Snell, The Day The Routers Died...,

"a song performed by the secret-wg in the closing plenary of the RIPE 55 conference"