Ragnarok

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Ragnarok provides support for user management and generation of dynamic web content based on user profiles and permissions. The intent is not to be the sort of sophisticated, and hence complex, solution available through many commercial products, but to "get the job done" in a way suitable for moderate traffic sites wishing to present some user-tailored data on top of a generic J2EE environment. Key points:

Intended as a framework for JSP development. Interaction is through java objects intended to be accessed via JSP scriptlets and a defined set of operations driven through servlet parameters (form fields and url arguments in the JSP's). Tag libs could be constructed to cover access - we just haven't done it yet.

Property file based, with suitable caching services (WorkHorse object cache) to allow sharing of properties by multiple web sessions.

Uses the WorkHorse ParameterHandler and other utilities, which provide useful type conversions, error handling, log control, etc.

Pluggable interfaces for authentication, log generation, id construction, field validation, and extension of the "user" object. The User object possesses event methods overridable to implement extra functionality for the web application. Includes ability to "hook" the removal of user session, as well as responding to web events.

Enforceable permissions on a per-key basis for profile update.

A predefined "administrative" permission, allowing a user to be flagged as an "administrator".

Support of an anonymous user or "guest" login.

Configurable for several ways of supporting login - users may or may not be allowed to self-register, change their user names, or remove themselves. Support included for "inactive" users and setting up a "confirm by email" registration procedure. Supports a cookie-based "remember login" scenario, of course. Optional support for having users expire and be automatically removed, and for having passwords expire, forcing users to change them regularly.

Possible to do all of the user administration functions through the servlet interface, using the defined operations - adding, removing users, modifying permissions and profile settings, changing passwords on user's behalf, etc.

The philosophy is to do the basic stuff - Ragnarok just provides users, profiles and permissions. The rest is up to the JSP programmer. Intended for any vanilla J2EE server - tested on the Tomcat reference implementation.

Extra Packages

Some extra packages are provided, which offer some added services on top of the Ragnarok infrastructure.

ragnarok.content

Manages the construction of a heirarchical set of content, which can be selectively accessible to various users, based on permissions.

The content package provides fundamental naming and labelling for its entries, which can be used to construct navigation jsp's.

ragnarok.directory

The directory package allows maintenance of a set of "summary" data from user profiles, without opening all the profiles. It is basically intended to support user lists.