Spring HTTP Invoker session (state) storage

Question

i have a Swing-client and a Server running on tomcat 7, which communicate with each other using Spring (3.1) HTTP invoker. The communication works fine so far (even with TSL), but now i am trying to add Spring Security.

side-note: In a typical webapplication i would use basic authentication to authenticate the user. After my CustomAuthenticationProvider returns an Authentication object for the user, everything "just works", meaning that on every further request the SecurityContext is automatically set. I guess the login returns a session-key to the client which is send on every request to identify the session.

That is pretty much what i am looking for with HTTP-Invoker. At the moment it seems like i get a new context on every request, which is bad, because my customAuthenticationManager.authenticate(Authentication auth) method is pretty costy and should really only be called once per user-session.

Any Idea?

edit i found some hints on this at http://forum.springsource.org/showthread.php?10764-Maintaing-State-while-using-HttpInvoker ,but as this link is more then 8 years old, i was hoping for an easier solution.

Answer 1

I found the solution now. First you need to know that the spring-security part is completely the same as it would be in a webapplication (which is great).

On client-side you need a more complex HTTP-client implementation. I used org.springframework.remoting.httpinvoker.HttpComponentsHttpInvokerRequestExecutor. On server-side you could use the create-session="always"-Attribute of the <http-element to ensure that a session is always created. However, i found it better to create the session myself (just call httpServletRequest.getSession() which creates a session if non exists), because that way you can specify when to do that. In my case i create the session in my authenticationProvider only if authentication was successful.