Spring Source has changed its maintenance policy (press release). From now on we’ll have to buy commercial support for maintenance releases of the Spring framework if we still want support after 3 months. This worries me a lot as Spring was becoming the defacto standard in J2EE development.

The need for a new book on Java EE is rising and I already got a perfect title for it! How would “J2EE Development without Spring” sound like? The cover :

This book would explain how you could still be agile in your development environments, without breaking your codebase and how you can get around the problems Spring currently has: too bloated, a lot of functionality and a lot of ways to get something done (annotations, various xml configs to do the same).

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A lot of users are having trouble when dealing with NTLM based authentication with Spring Security. The underlying NTLM support is built on top of JCIFS (jcifs.samba.org), an open source client library that implements the CIFS/SMB networking protocol in Java.

NTLM authentication allows the login credentials of a Windows user, who is logged on into a domain, to be automatically passed to your browser.
NTLM is a Microsoft-developed protocol providing single sign-on capabilities to web applications. It allows a web server to automatically discover the username of a browser client when that client is logged into a Windows domain and is using an NTLM-aware browser. A web application can then reuse the user’s Windows credentials without having to ask for them again.

This only works for Internet Explorer. When using Firefox, you will be prompted with an authentication prompt where you can enter your username and password. You can enable NTLM authentication also in Firefox, by doing the following steps:

• Type “about:config” in the address bar of Firefox
• You will see all settings of Firefox, but you need to find the key “network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris”.
• Enter the hostnames like: “host1.domain.com, host2.domain.com”
  or just “.domain.com” to list them all at once

Once you have setup your project with the correct dependencies and libraries, we are ready to start configuring our application context. You need spring-security-core and spring-security-ntlm as project dependencies in order to get it working.

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