RESTful Java Web Services - Third Edition

Securing JAX-RS services with basic authentication

In this section, we'll cover how to configure a JAX-RS application to challenge the clients for valid authentication credentials.

The basic authentication configuration depends on the web container being used. Throughout this book, we have used the GlassFish server for every application that required a Java web container; therefore, this example also assumes GlassFish as the target server for running the RESTful web APIs. We'll only look at the basic authentication configuration for the latest version of GlassFish (version 4.x).

The problem to solve is restricting the access for RESTful web services by creating a set of users for a specific security realm. A security realm is a mechanism ...