EAZ

Now that you've seen EAz in action, let's take a look at the details of the EAz implementation itself.

Let's close with a brief, simplified example of how you might use the EAz interface in a real application.

This will show users and managers an application's EAz permission grants, and enable you to construct a management console interface.

EAz implements a Permissions class as a single standard location for an EAz application to declare its permissions and actions.

Creating EAz using Enums and EnumSets in lieu of custom bit vectors turned out to be quite straightforward.

EAz's main job is to define and implement an interface that any application's code can query to authorize access to application resources.

The initial EAz implementation only provides authorization for groups, not for named individuals.

This gives EAz the ability to supply "well known" permission sets to an application's service layers by action name.

Both tables were produced by the EAz visualization framework introduced in this article.

EAz is an Enum-based authorization extension for Java EE authorization.

The techniques involved in implementing an EAz data access object to persist and retrieve permissions.

Applications using EAz must implement ACLManager, retrieving the ACL that secures a resource from cache or persistent storage.

As with the earlier tables, all the information above was generated from EAz using the display framework.

In this way, a single static class declares the entire extended authorization policy of an EAz application.

AllPermissions contains each permission available in the application using EAz.

EAuthZ continues to contain the core EAz framework code, including service methods, core classes, and ACLPerspective.

Figure 5 shows a sequence diagram of the typical EAz authorization process.

TestVirtualCampus. java is a JUnit4 test case that illustrates and exercises the virtual campus's EAz implementation.

Both permissions and actions are implemented in EAz as EnumSets.

EAz sample code is available showing how to translate database strings to and from EAz enum format.

Let's end by walking through how you would apply EAz to our virtual campus example.

EAz requires Java 5 or later to operate because of its reliance on the Java 5 Enum classes.

There are some limitations in the EAz implementation example, mainly for clarity and simplicity.

Part 1 of this series introduced the case for EAz by proposing

Using EAz in the virtual campus

Let's look at an example that complicates the situation, and illustrates the flexibility of the EAz framework at the same time. Suppose you