[keycloak-user] Keycloak and AngularJS

[Bill Burke]

What I like about the current admin console approach is that there is no 
book keeping required by the browser.  The Angular app has really no 
knowledge of how it is being secured as its all driven by the server. 
Also, you need to remember that the admin console was designed to be run 
in a non-Java EE, non-servlet environment.  While this is a requirement 
for Keycloak, it may not be for your application.  So, what I'm saying 
is that for your angular application, you could rely on the servlet 
container and keycloak adapter to maintain a session cookie and identity.

What I like about the keycloak.js approach is that there is no 
server-side adapter required for the UI.  The UI could be hosted off any 
number of static web sites and use CORS invocations to any number of 
Restful services.

There's also the debate of public vs. confidential clients.  The 
keycloak.js approach requires a public client.  My understanding was 
that confidential clients exist so that only an authenticated client 
(client *NOT* user) is able to obtain an access token.  I'm not exactly 
sure what additional security benefits are obtained here beyond this. 
I've been trying to ask this very question on OAuth mail lists but have 
been unable to get a response so far.



On 3/27/2014 10:41 AM, Nils Preusker wrote:
> Hi Stian and Bill,
>
> I've posted some questions regarding this topic before but I thought I'd
> start a new thread to keep things focused:
>
> I'm writing an AngularJS application with Java EE 6/7 REST (JAX-RS)
> backend modules. To add authentication and authorization to this
> application, I'd like to use keycloak
>
> * as a user and role management front-end
> * to provide a customizable login page (works very well by the way ;)
> * as an OAuth 2.0 token provider
> * to add user and role information to the HTTPRequests in my REST/
> backend modules
>
> To do this, I'm currently looking at keycloak.js and the customer-app-js
> example. However, I'm wondering whether this is really the best way to
> go. In a reply to an earlier post of mine you mentioned that the
> keycloak admin console is written in AngularJS and that you are using
> HTTP-only cookies there.
>
> However, in keycloak.js and the customer-app-js example you are
> retrieving the token in the JS app and adding an authorization header
> with a bearer token to the HTTP requests.
>
> So here are my questions:
>
> * Is there a reason you are using two different approaches in the admin
> console and the official demo app?
> * which one of the two approaches (bearer tokens vs. HTTP-only cookie)
> will you support/ will be the officially recommended one for HTML5/
> client side JavaScript applications in keycloak?
> * am I right in assuming that you haven't quite decided yet which
> approach to use and that you are still discussing this in the keycloak team?
>
> Looking forwards to your reply!
> Cheers,
> Nils
>
>
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-- 
Bill Burke
JBoss, a division of Red Hat
http://bill.burkecentral.com