User validation

[Bai Shen]

What are some common ways to validate an applet user? I have a database full of users, but I don't want to open ports in the firewall to allow outside machines to connect to the database. Is there another way to do this?

I tried googling, but all the examples I found were just for how to code a login prompt. I already have that. I just need to figure out how to validate my user.

[Paul Clapham]

You have two choices, when you look at the problem at a high level.

You can do the authentication on the client, which involves accessing the database directly. But you've rejected that option (rightly so in my opinion).

So you're left with the other option, which is to do the authentication on the server. This would involve sending the credentials to some component running on the server and reading the response from that component. In an all-Java world that component would be a servlet, but of course there are other options.

[Bai Shen]

Paul Clapham wrote:So you're left with the other option, which is to do the authentication on the server. This would involve sending the credentials to some component running on the server and reading the response from that component. In an all-Java world that component would be a servlet, but of course there are other options.

I'm gonna give this a try. It should work for my purposes.

Thanks.

[Bai Shen]

NM