Ten Things You Can Do With Spring Security

One

You can specify the authorisation provider of your choice in your Spring XML config file. You do this by configuring an authentication-manager as defined in Spring’s http://www.springframework.org/schema/security/spring-security-3.1.xsd schema. The simplified authentication-manager element definition looks something like this:

<xs:element name="authentication-manager">
 <xs:complexType>
  <xs:choice minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded">
   <xs:element name="authentication-provider">
    <xs:complexType>
     <xs:choice minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded">
      <xs:element ref="security:any-user-service"/>
      <xs:element name="password-encoder">...</xs:element>
     </xs:choice>
     <xs:attributeGroup ref="security:ap.attlist"/>
    </xs:complexType>
   </xs:element>
   <!-- This is BIG -->
   <xs:element name="ldap-authentication-provider">...</xs:element>
  </xs:choice>
  <xs:attributeGroup ref="security:authman.attlist"/>
 </xs:complexType>
</xs:element>

This means that, for example, you can use any number of authentication providers including basic authentication and JDBC authentication as shown in the snippet below: