This post describes three different options to get your local Java app running securely with TLS in no time, whether you need it publicly available or not.

A common OAuth 2.0 question we get: “How do I deal with OAuth in a load-balanced application?” The short answer: There’s nothing specific about session clustering for OAuth. The longer answer is—you likely still need to worry about cluster session management. This post will discuss how an OAuth login relates to your application’s session. And we’ll build a simple, secure, load-balanced application to demonstrate.

The topic of validating an OAuth 2.0 access tokens comes up frequently on this blog. Often we talk about how to validate JSON Web Token (JWT) based access tokens; however, this is NOT part of the OAuth 2.0 specification. JWTs are so commonly used that Spring Security supported them before adding support for remotely validating tokens (which is part of the OAuth 2.0 specification.)

Developers use APIs to for everything! You build APIs for your own apps to consume, or as a part of a microservices architecture. Bottom line, you’re building and using APIs to make your life easier. The ongoing effort to simplify development and work more efficiently, sometimes this also means looking for new libraries or processes (or more often less process). For many teams managing authentication and access control for their apps and APIs is more work than it’s worth, or simply…

REST endpoints are used just about everywhere you need to decouple your web service and client. Many developers have used Spring or JAX-RS for this purpose. Some have used one but not the other, in this post I’ll go over the the differences between the two using basically the same code. In future posts I’ll show you how easy it is to secure these REST endpoints using Apache Shiro and Stormpath. If you cannot wait until then, you can check out these examples right now.