Historically we have become constrained by an assumption that there should be a single authentication mechanism assigned to a web application.

The HTTP specification however allows for multiple mechanisms to be used in parallel - this task is to investigate the feasibility of writing a single authenticator that is compatible with both JBoss Web and the Sun HTTP server used within AS7 to support a negotiated authentication using a single authenticator backed by a CallbackHandler based realm.

The most common example is fallback from SPNEGO to a username / password based mechanism but for domain management we have also a case of trying to use CLIENT-CERT authentication first and then fallback if that is not possible.