[security-dev] Some thoughts on PL Subsystem

Pete Muir pmuir at redhat.com
Thu Apr 11 11:22:29 EDT 2013 

Right, we shouldn't provide any injection annotations for PicketLink. Instead, people can use @Resource and JNDI, or the factory, and write their own.

On 11 Apr 2013, at 16:11, Pedro Igor Silva <psilva at redhat.com> wrote:

> Yeah, I agree. For me we can handle that in the future. For now we can start with what we have.
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Anil Saldhana" <Anil.Saldhana at redhat.com>
> To: security-dev at lists.jboss.org
> Sent: Thursday, April 11, 2013 11:58:56 AM
> Subject: Re: [security-dev] Some thoughts on PL Subsystem
> 
> Pedro,
>   I am not sure that we want to have annotations.  Let us keep it 
> simple for the first release.
> 
> Regards,
> Anil
> 
> On 04/11/2013 09:49 AM, Pedro Igor Silva wrote:
>> So, if you guys agree we can start working on the following improvements:
>> 
>>     1) Rename the attribute jndi-url to jndi-name;
>>     2) Publish in JNDI an IdentityManager for each realm. That would look like this:
>> 
>>        picketlink/MyIdentityManagerFactory
>>        picketlink/MyIdentityManagerFactory/default (for the default realm)
>>        picketlink/MyIdentityManagerFactory/SomeRealm
>>        picketlink/MyIdentityManagerFactory/AnotherRealm
>> 
>>     3) Add the default attribute for the identity-management element and handle it properly
>> 
>>     4) Supports a @Realm annotation in order to allow the injection of IdentityManager that maps to a specific realm
>> 
>>     5) Support custom entities using a attribute to specify a module from where the @IDMEntity classes are + persistence.xml;
>> 
>> What do you think ?
>> 
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Pete Muir" <pmuir at redhat.com>
>> To: "Stian Thorgersen" <stian at redhat.com>
>> Cc: "Pedro Igor Silva" <psilva at redhat.com>, security-dev at lists.jboss.org
>> Sent: Thursday, April 11, 2013 11:16:14 AM
>> Subject: Re: [security-dev] Some thoughts on PL Subsystem
>> 
>> 
>> On 11 Apr 2013, at 14:35, Stian Thorgersen <stian at redhat.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> For custom entity classes I have two use cases in mind that we need should test/support:
>>> 
>>> * Layered product that needs to use custom entity classes for sub-systems - in this case there's no JavaEE deployments and the entity classes needs to be within a module. It's also fairly cumbersome to create an EntityManagerFactory from a subsystem so I don't think that should be required
>>> 
>>> * Two applications sharing the same custom entity classes - for example there's a main web app that contains the custom entity classes and the persistence.xml, then there's a utility war that contains one single @Startup @Singleton that is used to create some initial users - the utility war would load a lot quicker than the main web app, so the EMF may not be registered in JNDI in time
>>> 
>>> 
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>> From: "Pedro Igor Silva" <psilva at redhat.com>
>>>> To: "Stian Thorgersen" <stian at redhat.com>
>>>> Cc: security-dev at lists.jboss.org
>>>> Sent: Thursday, 11 April, 2013 2:04:17 PM
>>>> Subject: Re: [security-dev] Some thoughts on PL Subsystem
>>>> 
>>>> Hi Stian,
>>>> 
>>>>    Your thoughts make a lot of sense to me. Comments inline.
>>>> 
>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>> From: "Stian Thorgersen" <stian at redhat.com>
>>>>> To: security-dev at lists.jboss.org
>>>>> Sent: Thursday, April 11, 2013 9:37:59 AM
>>>>> Subject: [security-dev] Some thoughts on PL Subsystem
>>>>> 
>>>>> I've had a look at https://community.jboss.org/wiki/PicketLink3Subsystem
>>>>> and
>>>>> also had a bit of a play with it. It's starting to look really good. I've
>>>>> just got a few suggestions:
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Suppress logging
>>>>> ----------------
>>>>> At the moment there's a lot of logging at info level produced by the
>>>>> subsystem, this is mostly Hibernate. It would be great if we could somehow
>>>>> manage to suppress this logging output, might be problematic though as
>>>>> Hibernate logs this stuff at INFO level when it really should be DEBUG.
>>>>> There's also a few WARN's we might want to look into fixing.
>>>> Review the logging and messages is one of the things in our TODO list.
>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> JNDI names in standalone.xml
>>>>> ----------------------------
>>>>> I think it makes sense to use the same format for JNDI names as the
>>>>> datasource element, since folks will already be used to that. So I suggest
>>>>> we change it slightly to look like this:
>>>>> 
>>>>> <jpa-store data-source=”java:jboss/datasources/ExampleDS" ...>
>>>>> <identity-management jndi-name="java:picketlink/ExampleIDM" ...>
>>>>> 
>>>>> * Full jndi name (including java:) and use jndi-name instead of jndi-url
>>>> +1 for that. Not sure from where I got the jndi-url if the jndi-name is like
>>>> a pattern used by other subsystems :)
>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Manifest.mf
>>>>> -----------
>>>>> We need to make sure it works when including org.picketlink,
>>>>> org.picketlink.idm, etc in manifest.mf as well as
>>>>> jboss-deployment-structure.xml. The documentation should also reflect this.
>>>>> One thing I also thought of is that for the future it may be nice to have
>>>>> something that detects PicketLink usage in a deployment and automatically
>>>>> adds dependencies as required. For example if deployment uses
>>>>> @IdentityManager, @Identity, etc. annotations.
>>>>> 
>>>> +1. I like the idea, ans also mark them as IDM or Core deployments and handle
>>>> them properly.
>>>> 
>>>>> JNDI
>>>>> ----
>>>>> @Resource doesn't require CDI, so it should be possible to do the following
>>>>> without CDI (and without org.picketlink.core):
>>>>> 
>>>>> @Resource(lookup = "java:/picketlink/DevIdentityManager")
>>>>> private IdentityManagerFactory identityManagerFactory;
>>>>> 
>>>>> I was wondering if we wanted to have the IdentityManager available in JNDI
>>>>> as
>>>>> well?
>>>> The problem in publishing the IdentityManager in JNDI is related with realms.
>>>> If the IDM config has multiple realms which one should we put ? The default
>>>> ?
>>>> 
>>>> Give to users the IdentityManagerFactory instead, allow them to use their
>>>> configurations as they want.
>>>> 
>>>> One thing that I thought about that is if is a good idea to publish all
>>>> IdentityManager instances for each configured realm. So, if the IDM config
>>>> defines multiple realms, we publish a IdentityManager instance for each of
>>>> them. But as we discussed this may become messy.
>> I think this is the right approach.
>> 
>>>> What do you think ?
>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> CDI
>>>>> ---
>>>>> I was thinking about a nice way to do the CDI support of injecting a
>>>>> 'default' IdentityManager. I propose adding the attribute 'default' to the
>>>>> 'identity-management' element (<identity-management default="true" ...>).
>>>>> We
>>>>> should throw a warning if a user has specified multiple, then we just pick
>>>>> one (first one?).
>>>> I think we had some discussion about that. I'm +1 for the default attribute.
>>>> 
>>>> Ideally, we should throw an exception if multiple configurations are provided
>>>> with the default attribute, IMO.
>> Agreed, this should be an error.
>> 
>>>>> This does mean that if a 'identity-management' has the 'default' attribute
>>>>> set on it all deployments will by default have that IdentityManager
>>>>> injected
>>>>> into it. We also need a way for users to override this on a per-deployment
>>>>> basis. Can we easily detect if a deployment contains configuration for a
>>>>> IdentityManager itself?
>>>> The IMF can be obtained today in the following ways:
>>>> 
>>>>    1) From JNDI (@Resource, InitialContext, etc)
>>>>    2) Providing a @Producer that produces a IdentityConfiguration. In this
>>>>    case the deployment provides its own configuration, instead of using the
>>>>    subsystem config.
>>>>    3) When using the Core services, the deployment must specify a
>>>>    web.xml#resource-ref. Otherwise the deployment must provides its own
>>>>    configuration (normal usage of PicketLink Core)
>>>> 
>>>> Considering 2), if no IdentityConfiguration is produced, we can automatically
>>>> choose the default.
>>>> 
>>>> Considering 3), if no web.xml at resource-ref is defined, we can automatically
>>>> choose the default.
>>>> 
>>>>> Further we need to have a way for a user to specify which IdentityManager
>>>>> to
>>>>> inject. I think this should be done based on the 'alias' attribute and not
>>>>> the 'jndi-name', as we should leave jndi completely out of the picture for
>>>>> CDI (resource-ref in web.xml/ejb.xml should be used for JNDI lookup,
>>>>> InitialContext#lookup and @Resource, I find it confusing to use this for
>>>>> CDI). I propose that we use the ServiceRegistry to retrieve the
>>>>> IdentityManagerFactory service based on the alias specified by a @Alias
>>>>> qualifer:
>>>> If you look at the Infinispan subsystem, this is the way it works. Using the
>>>> @Resource annotation to inject cachecontainers, etc.
>>>> 
>>>> I like that because it is very simple, and requires very little from our and
>>>> users side.
>> This is also the approach the spec defines to access server resources.
>> 
>>>> We have a test case that shows how to use CDI qualifiers. It is quite simple.
>>>> 
>>>> But at the same time, I agree that use the name is more beautiful than the
>>>> jndi-name :).
>>>> 
>>>> We can try that, if you want.
>> We shouldn't do this, it encourages the CDI anti-pattern of using string based qualifiers.
>> 
>>>>> @Inject
>>>>> @Alias(“development”)
>>>>> private IdentityManager identityManager;
>>>>> 
>>>>> Obviously users should also be able to add their own qualifiers, I think
>>>>> this
>>>>> should work:
>>>>> 
>>>>> @Inject @Alias(“development”)
>>>>> @Produces @Development
>>>>> private IdentityManager identityManager;
>> This won't work, CDI will give you a definition error. You need to use @Resource to access server resources, or what Pedro suggests below.
>> 
>>>>> One alternative to the above is to change 'alias' to 'name' then we could
>>>>> use
>>>>> the standard @Named annotation instead of @Alias.
>>>> We are not injecting the IdentityManager anymore, but the
>>>> IdentityManagerFactory. The @Alias makes sense to get a IdentityManager
>>>> instance for a configured realm. Maybe we should consider @Realm, instead.
>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Custom Entity Classes
>>>>> ---------------------
>>>>> Personally I don't like the idea of custom entity classes (and
>>>>> persistence.xml) being deployed as JavaEE deployments (i.e.
>>>>> standalone/deployments). This is also problematic for sub-systems that
>>>>> wants
>>>>> to use the IDM if they need to use custom entity classes (there's a good
>>>>> chance we'll need this for EventJuggler). I also think this will be
>>>>> problematic if multiple deployments uses the same IdentityManager.
>>>>> 
>>>>> One idea I had was that we could create a module that contains the custom
>>>>> Entity classes, then specify that on the 'jpa-store' element:
>>>>> 
>>>>> <jpa-store data-source=”java:jboss/datasources/ExampleDS"
>>>>> custom-entity-module='org.company.acme.pl' />
>> This should work IMO.
>> 
>>>>> The module 'org.company.acme.pl' would contain a single jar with the Entity
>>>>> classes. When 'custom-entity-module' is used we include that module instead
>>>>> of 'org.picketlink.idm.schema' module when creating the EMF + we should be
>>>>> able to detect the correct classes using the @IDMEntity.
>>>> The JPA store lets you use the EMF in two ways:
>>>> 
>>>>   1) Using a embedded persistence unit. In this case you need only yo
>>>>   provide the datasource. The built-in schema (pl-idm-schema) will be used.
>>>>   2) Using your own persistence unit. In this case you need to expose your
>>>>   EMF via JNDI.
>>>> 
>>>> Regarding 2), you are not forced to deploy your persistence.xml as a
>>>> separated deployment. You can also use the persistence unit deployed with
>>>> your application.
>>>> 
>>>> I'm going to create some tests so check a possible classloader issue when
>>>> using custom entity classes.
>> 
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