Custom Login Handler - Level of Effort?

[Cantor, Scott]

On 5/9/12 3:34 PM, "Quint Van Deman" <qvandeman at emergent360.com> wrote:

>I'm currently planning for a project that may necessitate the
>development of a custom login handler, one which validates the users
>identity against a remote web service.  For anyone who's gone through
>the process before, what was level of effort required to construct a
>custom login handler in a rough order of magnitude?

Fleshing out a basic, working handler that did SSO via cookies,
implemented a complete "sub-workflow" of submodules that handled
presentation with Velocity instead of JSP and login with JAAS, and a
module to warn about expiring passwords took me about 5-10 days. What
you're describing could be done either directly or as a JAAS module, and
either way would probably be more like a day or two

That's on top of picking up Spring basics, enough to do any extension.
That took me a few hours, maybe a day or so, of reading existing sources
initially.

My background is not Java and I hadn't done any Java to speak of in
several years, but I'm obviously extremely familiar with the IdP's general
mechanics. I knew nothing of Spring but general ideas.

-- Scott