I am interested in some thoughts on how valid our implementation of equals is on our SimplePrincipal. The javadoc for Principal described the requirements of the equals method as: - anonymous wrote : Compares this principal to the specified object. Returns true if the object passed in matches the principal represented by the implementation of this interface. To me I think our equals method goes too far. I should be able to implement my own Principal which contains additional information that I want to be included in an equality check but if the equals method of SimplePrincipal is called it is going to claim they are equal even though they are not. So we could have a situation where SimplePrincipal.equals(OtherPrincipal) returns true when OtherPrincipal.equals(SimplePrinicpal) returns false. | public boolean equals(Object another) | { | if (!(another instanceof Principal)) | return false; | String anotherName = ((Principal) another).getName(); | boolean equals = false; | if (name == null) | equals = anotherName == null; | else | equals = name.equals(anotherName); | return equals; | } | Looking at other Principal implementation Sun seem to have the same interpretation as me as well, here is their description of their equals method for their KerberosPrincipal implementation: - anonymous wrote : Compares the specified Object with this Principal for equality. Returns true if the given object is also a KerberosPrincipal and the two KerberosPrincipal instances are equivalent. More formally two KerberosPrincipal instances are equal if the values returned by getName() are equal and the values returned by getNameType() are equal. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4076265#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...