9.1. Introducing Spring Security

Spring Security is a security framework that provides declarative security for your Spring-based applications. Spring Security provides a comprehensive security solution, handling authentication and authorization at both the web request level and at the method invocation level. Based on the Spring Framework, Spring Security takes full advantage of dependency injection (DI) and aspect-oriented techniques.

Spring Security got its start as Acegi Security. Acegi was a powerful security framework, but it had one big turn-off: it required a lot of XML configuration. I’ll spare you the intricate details of what such a configuration may have looked like. Suffice it to say that it was common for a typical Acegi configuration to grow to several hundred lines of XML.