If you want to go the JSR 168 way and being independent of any portal you have no choice but going with bvogt solution. There is no User object that is defined by the spec. As he said, the username can act as an id. In theory you could have a portal vendor that doesn't associate that username with an id number. (without talking about performance) View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4031039#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...