What is Heracles Project?

Heracles Project is a distributor for JAAS and JNDI. It is an easy way to authenticate Microsoft Active Directory (ADS) users in your own java application. It helps to identify the ADS-user's group membership(s). This project will be configured by the heracles.xml file.

News

  • 2007-05-08: Heracles 1.0 released
  • 2007-04-29: define the heracles architecture
  • 2007-04-23: start of the analyse
  • 2007-03-17: working into ACEGI framework
  • 2006-02-12: working into JAAS and JNDI frameworks
  • 2007-01-05: planning the goals of heracles
  • 2006-10-11: project opened on sourceforge

Abstract

For many buisness applications it is important to have a login procedure. Most companies have Microsoft Active Directory which stores the account information of all employees. The java developer has to write special authentication classes in all his applications again and again.

The goal of the Heracles Project is to provide a viable option for developers that could include one framework and the authentication is realized for a normal application or a webapplication with ACEGI.

Specifically, Heracles Project seeks to:

  • provide a way to realize an authentication via Kerberos;
  • includes plugins for ACEGI framework;
  • identify the membership of an user
  • search in the Active Directory for more user information, such as mail-addresses or phone numbers.

The Project in the overview:

  • API The Heracles API provides you with a simple project interface. This includes authentication methods as well as others which enable ldap queries.
  • Authentication The authentication mechanism asks Kerberos for a valid principal and its credentials, using the JAAS framework.
  • Ldap queries JNDI makes it possible to connect a ldap directory and to do differd kinds of work such as create objects, delete objects or to search for objects or their attributes.

    - The Heracles Project team