Guys!

I think this discussion has currently no point, as clearly there are two groups of people talking about different things.

Lets take step back and define what is being discussed.

Jason is talking about having some core IDM api/spi part of WildFly so we could build on top of it,
first use case we need this for is Undertow which would use it for adding new authentication mechanisms.

What most of others are arguing is how should PL be integrated into WildFly.

To lay some common grounds here, if we want to put anything into core WildFly not as a subsystem it has to have as minimal dependencies as possible.

If that dependency is only JDK that is optimal solution, this is why discussion why we dont want to have anything EE-like in WildFly core.

To make it easier to understand, there is long term plan to split WildFly core into separete distribution that will be about 10-15mb big
and will then allow you to install whatever profile you need it to run, that might be EE, OSGi, TB, CD or whatever profile or set of extensions you will need to run your applications.

This "core" exists already today but it is part of same code base and distribution, that is why most people see AS just as whole EE bundle that we provide for download.

So what can we do about IDM integration? First we need some core API/SPI that we would like to have as part of WildFly core
and as add-on to that there should be extension (subsystem) that could provide all the advanced stuff users would need.

I don't know PL too much so i dont know if it is possible to have some core api/spi and everything else loaded as plugins (maybe via service loader)?
this way user could configure jpa based storage if running in EE container otherwise it could be file, memory or direct db based one(i have no idea which ones are there)

So what we need as starting point is some as small as possible set of PL (or whatever else we need) that would embedded in core and that could communicate fuhrer.

tomaz