Overview

CAS is an enterprise Single Sign-On solution for web services. Single Sign-On (SSO) means a better user experience when running a multitude of web services, each with it's own means of authentication. With a SSO solution, different web services may authenticate to one authorative source of trust, that the user needs to log in to, instead of requiring the end-user to log in into each separate service.

JA-SIG produces an enterprise-wide single sign on system known as CAS. Unlike other initiatives, JA-SIG's Central Authentication Service is open source, widely used, simple to understand, platform independent, and supports proxy capabilities. Petals View could be connected to a CAS server to provide single sign on.

Somewhere in your enterprise you will need to setup a CAS server. The CAS server is simply a standard WAR file, so there isn't anything difficult about setting up your server. Inside the WAR file you will customise the login and other single sign on pages displayed to users.

You can learn more about CAS at http://www.ja-sig.org/cas. You will also need to visit this site to download the CAS Server files.

How to customise Petals View to work with CAS ?

This section assumes that you have installed a CAS server accessible to the following URL : https://myHost:8443/cas

Enable CAS authentication

By default, Petals View is setup to works with an embedded User Management system that allows to manage application users directly from the Petals View GUI. So, if you want to delegate authentication to a CAS system, the first thing you have to do is to disable the default authentication service and enable the CAS one.

Go to your web application directory in your application server web app repository. We call this directory WEBAPP_ROOT.

Then edit the file located in : WEBAPP_ROOT/WEB-INF/spring/