Java WS Authenticator Problem

Question

Hi all, at the moment I am struggling with a bug in Sun's class 'java.net.Authenticator'. It seems that the Authenticator class has a system wide static Authenticator. This results in the following problem in my multi-threaded application.

1. Thread 1 - Authenticates for User 1
   
2. Thread 2 - Authenticates for User 2
   
3. Thread 1 - Executes the code to download messages for User 1
   

At this point, the system will get the messages for User 2 instead of the messages for User 1.

I have tried searching for a solution. Many suggested trying the following code:

AuthCacheValue.setAuthCache(new AuthCacheImpl());
Authenticator.setDefault(exchangeAuthenticator);

However, this does not work for me since my application is multi-threaded (exchangeAuthenticator will always be set to the authenticator initialised in the latest thread).

If anyone has any idea, even a hack would do at the moment, I would really appreciate that, since at the moment the only 'neat' solution is to place a 'synchronized' on the main execution method with a dramatic effect on performance.

Cheers Chris

Answer 1

In my experience, your best bet is to ditch the builtin http support and get Apache's HttpClient.

If that's not an option, create a single object extending Authenticator, but store the username and password in ThreadLocal instances. That way each thread can retrieve it's own values.