I am confused about authentication with BlazeDS. Most of the few examples I have found for authentication and authorization in BlazeDS and consequently Java Servlets in general make use of HTTP basic and digest authentication and realms for authorization. These examples are very simplistic and involve XML files with the user credentials rather than using a database. My past experience in web applications used form based logins and sessions for authentication and authorization, but I am not sure how to do this with Flex apps with BlazeDS backends.
What I want to do is have some way to access some service on the backend to handle authentication like an HTML form and some way to store session data in a cookie for authorization, but I am having trouble finding relevant details using cookies in BlazeDS and Flex applications.
If HTTP authentication with either basic or digest authentication is the best way, then is there any resource to find out how to authentication users with the credentials stored in the database rather than an XML file?
I am not particularly interested in web frameworks since I would like to understand how to authenticate/authorize users with a plain Servlet and BlazeDS.