Ben Alex

Creator of Spring Security, Spring Roo & SpringSource Principal S/W Engineer

Dr Ben Alex is a Principal Software Engineer with SpringSource, and has been working professionally in software since 1995. Ben founded the Spring Security project in 2003 and led its development into a popular, open-source security framework that is used in numerous government, banking and military installations. More recently Ben founded and serves as lead of the Spring Roo and Spring Shell projects, both of which deliver significant productivity and usability benefits to those using Spring technologies.

Ben's career history also includes other roles in software development and business. From 2005 until 2008, he led the establishment and exponential growth of SpringSource's operations in Asia-Pacific. Prior to SpringSource, Ben founded and grew a successful Australian software company, Acegi Technology Pty Limited. He has been a director and advisor to businesses in diverse industries including business services, intellectual property licensing and ecommerce.

In recent years, Ben has presented at technology conferences including JavaOne, The Server Side Java Symposium, JAOO, Oredev, SpringOne and The Spring Experience. He is a regular guest presenter at user groups across the world, with recent appearances in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Perth, Singapore, Wellington, Auckland, Christchurch and Stockholm. He also authored the security chapter of the Wiley book, "Professional J2EE Development with Spring Framework," and maintains a blog at http://blog.springsource.com/main/author/bena/.

Presentations

Spring (Acegi) Security

Join Ben for a lively discussion on ACEGI Security.

ACEGI Security

Beyond Low-Hanging Fruit: Domain Object Access Control

In this presentation Ben distills domain object security in Acegi. You will learn the ACL architecture, common plug-in points, and how to structure your application to use hierarchical ACL services. You will see some of the key scalability and persistence issues involved when using ACLs.

Acegi Security provides four major security capabilities: 1. authentication 2. web request authorization 3. method-level authorization and 4. domain object access control

Between these, users have enjoyed a broad foundation upon which to integrate security into their Spring-based enterprise applications.

Since Acegi 1.0 configuring basic authentication (1) and authorization (2, 3) is pretty simple--you've probably "been there, done that".

Domain object access control lists (ACL), on the other hand, are often considered one of the most powerful yet confusing areas of Acegi Security. ACLs allow you to restrict access to individual domain object instances, similar to permissions to files on a filesystem. It's very powerful, but not well understood.

This is a not-to-be-missed presentation if you need high-performance, fine-grained domain object security.

A Fast Hop into Real Object Oriented (ROO) Apps: Tech Case Study of a Real-World ROO App

In this presentation we will study a web application developed by a major Australian corporation. We say the application uses a "real object oriented", or ROO, architecture. That means we swapped out those anemic domain objects, fat services, and repetitive DAOs for rich domain objects that utilize transparent persistence and encapsulate business rules. If you are grappling with how to do this DDD stuff, this presentation will show you what worked and provide inspiration for your own projects.

Direct from Australia, this presentation will feature an authentic Australia ROO. While quarantine restrictions have prevented the export of a live kangaroo, as a consolation we will have photos and code 'a plenty.

In this presentation we'll study an internal web application developed by a major Australian corporation. The application uses a "real object oriented", or ROO, architecture. That means we swapped out those anemic domain objects, fat services, and those repetitive DAOs for rich domain objects that utilize transparent persistence and encapsulate business rules.

We will be looking at code, architecture and key considerations in this presentation (rather than reviewing processes or requirements).

If you're grappling with how to do all this DDD stuff, this presentation will show you what worked at a technical level and hopefully provide some inspiration and ideas for your own projects.

SpringOne 2GX 2011