Chapter 12. Conclusions

In this final chapter let us take a step back and review the subject matter of the book from a distance and identify patterns, general principles and the interconnectedness of the topics. Doing this also presents us with an opportunity to talk about ideas and concepts at a higher level, making meaningful associations, and deriving conclusions, with the full awareness of the underlying details. You may remember that we described our overview of the Java platform as taking an aerial view of the Java landscape, with the explicit acknowledgement that most of the readers would be familiar with the details, in one of the early chapters and outlined its benefits. Let us do the same in this chapter for the topics covered by this book.

What we have covered in this book is best described as the intersection between the developer's view of enterprise application security and the Java platform for developing enterprise applications. Even within this intersection, we focused on hands-on treatment of typical security issues faced by the Java developer. This focus precluded topics like designing or implementing a security protocol but included use of existing APIs and tools to solve problems like setting up and configuring a secure Web application, developing security-aware EJBs, incorporating security in Web services, and so on.