J2eeBasedPreAuthenticatedWebAuthenticationDetailsSource… WAT??

WAT? This hilarious talk about the incredible quirks of JavaScript had been going around on Twitter and other media. In case you haven’t already, take a look at it here: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat Speaking of WAT, let’s talk about Spring Security. Spring has undertaken great effort to replace the clumsy, verbose parts of J2EE to replace them with straightforward and intuitive APIs. In Spring Security, you will find great features like the eraseCredentialsAfterAuthentication property, which keeps you from accidentally letting credentials lie around. Accidentally. What, like printing them to the standard out, or to the HTML document?? If this happens to you accidentally, then you might have a lot of other problems, too. Frameworks helping people to avoid such accidents remind me of PHP and this interesting post about how fundamentally broken PHP is: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ If you’ve ever heard about PHP’s abominable “magic quotes”, you’ll understand what I mean.

More examples

There’s more. Spring has incredibly specialised API types, such as:
  • J2eeBasedPreAuthenticatedWebAuthenticationDetailsSource
  • PreAuthenticatedGrantedAuthoritiesWebAuthenticationDetails
  • PreAuthenticatedGrantedAuthoritiesAuthenticationDetails
  • GrantedAuthorityFromAssertionAttributesUserDetailsService
  • MutableGrantedAuthoritiesContainer
  • MethodSecurityMetadataSourceBeanDefinitionParser
  • AbstractUserDetailsServiceBeanDefinitionParser
Wow. I didn’t know Java identifiers were even allowed to be that long. And there’s more. Consider the package names (line break introduced artificially for improved readability):

org.springframework.security.web
   .authentication.preauth.websphere
   .WebSpherePreAuthenticatedWebAuthenticationDetailsSource

Note the repetition of concepts in both package and class names:
  • 2x “web”
  • 4x “authentication” (out of which 2x “pre-authenticated”)
  • 2x “websphere
For all of you who weren’t aware that the class browsing frame in the regular Javadoc frameset has a horizontal scrollbar, I invite you to navigate through the incredible verbosity of Spring Security: http://static.springsource.org/spring-security/site/docs/3.1.x/apidocs/index.html </rant>

9 thoughts on “J2eeBasedPreAuthenticatedWebAuthenticationDetailsSource… WAT??

    1. Haha, very nice. You can calculate the probability of such a generator to produce an AuthenticatorAuthenticatedAuthenticationAuthenticatingAuthenticatorCator

  1. Ah Spring security. Last time I tried to use it I was trying to figure out how to do something relatively simple (I thought) but which was not exactly like anything the manual showed. I kept finding explanations on the web and example code, and would find that they did not work, because they were for different versions of it. That’s the nice thing about Spring, I guess. Don’t like their recommended way of doing something? No problem, wait a release or two, and it will surely be different…

    I think next time I may try Shiro: https://shiro.apache.org/

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