Context root and authentication mechanism

The remote REST service for PUMA is implemented as a servlet that runs as a separate enterprise application on the WebSphere Portal server.

The starting weight of the application has to be higher than the starting weight of the portal application (usually wps.ear) because it needs the portal run time during startup. This is set by the corresponding install and ConfigEngine tasks. By default the REST Service application defines the context root /wps/um, where the /wps part is equivalent to the general portal context path. The /um path element is considered to be fix as it is part of the URI path definitions in the RESTful interface.

Use the Portal context path as a prefix for the context root is a necessary prerequisite with regards to the default authentication method configured for the servlet, which reuses the application specific form based authentication mechanism implemented in the portal. This way, a request that needs authentication is redirected to the appropriate portal login page. After successful authentication, the portal login again redirects to the previous URL. As this requires a specific handling of the redirect on the client side, IBM recommends that clients make sure that a security context exists already before calling operations that involve protected URLs. This is usually the case when running in a portal session context. Alternatively, we can configure the servlet for different authentication methods by changing the web.xml descriptor appropriately, for example, for basic or SSL client certificate authentication.

Parent How the portal implements the remote PUMA REST service