Imposing a bit of order

by David Wall

July 8, 2002 —

The assembly-descriptor of an Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) allows you to
specify security roles and assign permissions to them. In this way, you
can restrict various classes of user to the methods and fields they need
to access for their work, thus somewhat limiting the damage a malicious
party can do.

Because they're part of the deployment descriptors, the application
server manages the assembly-descriptors and the rules they establish.
Security roles are essentially logical fictions, similar to Microsoft
Windows domains, imposed on a system artificially to provide an
additional degree of management control.

In order to create a security restriction, we must first create a role.
That's done like this:

chief

Next, we need to clarify what users of that role can do. Continuing the
assembly-descriptor element:

chief

WarriorCommanderBean
*

That sequence of elements gives users of type chief access to all
methods in WarriorCommanderBean.

ITworld