This, of course, would present certain issues regarding maintaining user data in two places, but I wanted the authentication mechanism to be consistent with other applications in the environment.

I took a look at the security settings in the Web project's deployment descriptor and all of the various settings appeared to be sufficient for use in the WebSphere environment. There are additional settings, however, in the higher-level Roller project, which produces the .ear file.

I opened up the menu tree on that project and double-clicked on its deployment descriptor to bring it up in edit mode. Selecting the lower Security tab brought up the security configuration panel in Figure D.

FIGURE D


The Security configuration panel. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Clicking on the Gather button goes into all of the subordinate projects and "gathers" all of the possible security roles so that they can be further defined. In this case, there is only one role: editor, see Figure E.

FIGURE E


The "editor" role gathered from the Web project. Roll over picture for a larger image.

To define this role, I checked the Users/Groups option under WebSphere Bindings and clicked on Add to add myself to the list for testing purposes, as shown in Figure F.

FIGURE F


Adding a new user to the specified Role. Roll over picture for a larger image.

After entering my user name and clicking the Finish button, my user id appeared on the list of users assigned to the editor role, as you can see in Figure G.

FIGURE G


The new user should now appear on the list. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Closing and saving the Deployment Descriptor completed the security configuration portion of the process.

3, 2, 1
At this point, I felt that I had all of the pieces in place and was ready to give it a go. I right-clicked on the Web project to bring up the context menu and selected Run on Server. Then I chose the WebSphere 5.1 Test Environment and checked the Always use this Server box so that I wouldn't have to go through that step in the future.

It always takes a little while to configure a new server and a new application for the first time, so I waited patiently for that initial roller screen to pop up in the browser window, just like it did when I ran the Roller demo package on Tomcat for the first time.

Results finally came, but it wasn't the main Roller page that I was expecting. Instead, I was greeted with the following sinister message, as Figure H shows.

FIGURE H


The final result of the process thus far. Roll over picture for a larger image.

A quick look at the application server log, in Figure I, revealed the following messages:

FIGURE I


Viewing the WebSphere Test Environment's application server log. Roll over picture for a larger image.