Authentication classes

Two classes in the servlet package perform authentication for servlets: AuthenticationServlet and AS400Servlet.

AuthenticationServlet class

AuthenticationServlet is an HttpServlet implementation that performs basic authentication for servlets. Subclasses of AuthenticationServlet override one or more of the following methods:

• Override the validateAuthority() method to perform the authentication (required)
• Override the bypassAuthentication() method so that the subclass authenticates only certain requests
• Override the postValidation() method to allow additional processing of the request after authentication

The AuthenticationServlet class provides methods that allow you to:

• Initialize the servlet
• Get the authenticated user ID
• Set a user ID after bypassing authentication
• Log exceptions and messages

AS400Servlet class

The AS400Servlet class is an abstract subclass of AuthenticationServlet that represents an HTML servlet. You can use a connection pool to share connections and manage the number of connections to the server that a servlet user can have.

The AS400Servlet class provides methods that allow you to:

• Validate user authority (by overriding the validateAuthority() method of the AuthenticationServlet class)
• Connect to a system
• Get and return connection pool objects to and from the pool
• Close a connection pool
• Get and set the HTML document head tags
• Get and set the HTML document end tags

For more information about servlets in general, see the reference section.