Hi,
We recently had a discussion on the OpenLiberty mailing list [] whether Java EE application servers are required to bundle a default JACC provider.
My reading of Section 2.5 of the spec [2] is that application servers must provide an implementation of the PolicyConfigurationFactory and the PolicyConfiguration components, which effectively would mean that a JACC provider is present on the classpath: "Each JRE of an application server must be provided with classes that
implement the PolicyConfigurationFactory class and PolicyConfiguration
interface. These classes must be compatible with the Policy
implementation class installed for use by the JRE."
If we look at the recently open sourced TCK, there's a test for that assertion [3][4], but from what I can see, it is broken: it installs the PolicyConfigurationFactory and PolicyConfiguration implementations before checking they were already there, always passing.
The spec uses a somewhat cumbersome language and there's no clear hint that such default provider is required to be enabled. The JACC mailing list archives are available only from 2013 [5] but the spec haven't received much development after that time.
So my question is, was any public clarification made on what the spec actually meant? Did the EG reach a consensus on it?
Regards,
Guillermo González de Agüero
[1]
https://groups.io/g/openliberty/topic/contributing_a_liberty_bundle/25512336?p=,,,20,0,0,0::recentpostdate%2Fsticky,,,20,2,0,25512336