Grails Integration Plugin

Plugin that adds support for AtlassianCrowd authentication and authorization to a Grails webapp.

Sure, you can wire up Grails with Acegi and the new Crowd-Acegi integration APIs released with v1.3, as Katie has done here, but that is way too much work. This Grails plugin has no dependency on Acegi, and talks to Crowd directly for its authentication and authorization requirements. The plugin borrows ideas from Grails Authorize for the simple auth/auth configuration, and from Grails Acegi for a GSP taglib.

The plugin provides a Grails webapp with simple hooks for Grails controllers and actions to require authentication and authorization. Pages requiring authentication will redirect a non-authenticated user to a supplied Login controller (with a customizable view). Logouts are handled by a supplied Logout controller. Authentication is fully integrated with Crowd's single sign-on capabilities; if a user is already logged into Crowd, the user will be authenticated to the webapp automatically.

Pages requiring authorization will return to a non-authorized user a http 503 FORBIDDEN error. The logic and/or view handling that error is also fully customizable within Grails.

The plugin also provides some Grails tag libraries to manipulate views depending on: whether the user is authenticated, and whether the user is authorized, and at what level. A tag library to easily grab information about the currently authenticated user is provided. As well, a tag library is provided for easily retrieving SOAPAttribute values from a Crowd SOAPEntity.

Finally, several utility classes provide the same functionality of the tag libraries in Groovy code. This is very useful for logic written in the controller and service areas.