I think on this one it is worth starting with some of the history and then some of the planned next steps as overall I think anything developed here should consider how we plan to evolve the configuration.
At the time we added WildFly Elytron it was a new security solution for the application server, all deployments that already existed would be using PicketBox based security so we wanted a solution that would allow the existing deployments to continue to work 'as-is' whilst allowing new deployments to make use of WildFly Elytron and to allow administrators the choice to migrate their deployments to WildFly Elytron. This is the reason we added mappings to both the EJB and Undertow subsystems, if we don't match on a mapping then assume they want PicketBox, if we do match on a mapping apply Elytron based security.
There is one gap in this mapping that is likely to be changing soon, presently the mapping only maps to a http-authentication-factory - for a change I am in the process of making, for the Web Services integration and I assume your integration this factory is not really required - in general these type of integrations only require the SecurityDomain. So that is one change I plan to make, the mapping could specify a SecurityDomain instead of the http-authentication-factory.
The SecurityDomain is already automatically associated with the ClassLoader of the deployment but we could reach a point in the future where if the domain is available it is attached to the DeploymentInfo so if something else wants to make use of it it just needs to check if it is attached - we could still add some of our handlers such as the one to associate the flexible identity.
At a slightly later point I do also need to look at how we can active the Elytron integration without requiring the mapping, I don't know if this would be using the existing elements and annotations or if we would want something specifically related to Elytron so that would need to be a later discussion.
But overall at this stage I wonder if we would be better to ensure we are dealing with attachments to the DeploymentInfo rather than getting too tightly tied to the application security domain mappings which is something we know will need to evolve further possibly to the point it is eliminated.
Regards,
Darran Lofthouse.