Acegi with HiveMind or PicoContainer?

[genegc1]

Has anyone tried using Acegi with HiveMind or PicoContainer? Is it possible?

The only reason I ask is that for political reasons, it would be easier to sell Acegi Security to my colleagues if it wasn't completely dependent on Spring.

-Gene

[Ben Alex]

Are you actually going to use it with HiveMind or PicoContainer?

I'll quickly summarise dependencies on Spring itself as far as I recall.

Acegi Security strongly depends on Spring for configuration. It uses Spring lifecycle support (ie InitializingBean) all over the place.

Acegi Security uses Spring's data access superclasses for JDBC.

The two secure methods are MethodInvocation and FilterInvocation. The latter is a home-grown wrapper that works with Servlet Filters, so it's not Spring-dependent. The former uses AOP Alliance's MethodInvocation so provided you can wire it up with another container, it should work.

Having said that, I'm not really sure why you'd want to use Acegi Security with some other IOC container. Acegi Security was designed for use with Spring. The fact it uses the Spring framework for its own configuration should be expected.

[genegc1]

So other than the JDBC superclasses, it sounds like Acegi is only using Spring for it's IoC container. It's certainly your call, but it would benefit Acegi to be compatible with at least the other big two IoC containers. Their users would surely welcome the configurable security system (you could always test the waters on their forums).

As for me, I hope to be able to get Spring accepted at my workplace - and then to use Acegi in conjuction with Spring. But I have to present both technologies separately. I could make a stronger case for Acegi if it didn't require "IoC container lock-in" - so to speak.

[greg_greg]

Hi,
I'd also be interested in acegi outside spring. Well, the thing is, we have a project, currently running with webwork and picocontainer. We're not ready and don't necessarily have reasons to move to Spring, although we'd love to use acegi. Now, what I'm wondering is, can acegi be used.. maybe in spring, but be integrated with an application which is absolutely not using spring in any way? Would using spring just for acegi work?

I guess this will depend on how much I want to use from acegi?

[Ben Alex]

Nothing has really changed since my October posting, except Acegi Security now also uses Spring's EH-CACHE factory class. Although you're free to build an EH-CACHE Object and inject it via any other IoC container.

As I said in October, Acegi Security uses Spring for its lifecycle services (ie InitializingBean), DI itself, and in two classes, ApplicationContextAware as the publish messages to the application content.

So there's nothing really stopping you using it with another IoC container if you wanted to.