Hello, I'm new to JSP development (and to dynamic web development as a whole) so please bear with me. I'm investigating using JSP/Java for a project at my workplace. My system (test server, if you will) is a PC running Windows XP Pro and I am using Tomcat 5.5.9.
I have a situation where I want to be able to provide user access to an application by determining the identity of the requesting user, without them having to go through a login procedure. Specifically, what I've been trying to do is call the request.getRemoteUser() method to ID the requesting user. When I do so, I keep getting null. After reading in the JSP and Java servlet specifications, I see that this call would return null if the user is not authenticated. Reading further, I get the impression that by default, no authentication is needed to access resources. If a security mechanism is specified in the deployment descriptor (which I take to be my webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\web.xml file), then authentication would be required. Now, I'm not sure that I understand all the nuances of the terminology (not to mention the technology), but it seems that what I've been trying to do should have worked. The web.xml file indicated above contains only the following (and this is the way it came - I added nothing): <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <!-- Copyright 2004 The Apache Software Foundation Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License. --> <web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd" version="2.4"> <display-name>Welcome to Tomcat</display-name> <description> Welcome to Tomcat </description> <!-- JSPC servlet mappings start --> <servlet> <servlet-name>org.apache.jsp.index_jsp</servlet-name> <servlet-class>org.apache.jsp.index_jsp</servlet-class> </servlet> <servlet-mapping> <servlet-name>org.apache.jsp.index_jsp</servlet-name> <url-pattern>/index.jsp</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping> <!-- JSPC servlet mappings end --> </web-app> Does anyone have any suggestions as to why this doesn't work -or- any suggestions for an alternate method? Also, in a more general sense, any information regarding good sources of information for learning how to do JSP/Servlet programming (web, books, etc.) would be appreciated. Please keep in mind that I am new at this, so examples of some obscure objective or expert level programming will probably be over my head. Thanks, Joe Gagnon --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]