Why jAuthentic?

Authentication is a very common functionality that is required in almost all applications. The steps involved in authentication includes - getting User Input and validating it. From the application developer's point of view these steps are external to the core logic that the application intends to do.
In many applications, it is common practice to call a specific method that would show up certain form in which the user might enter details which will be validated.This has the following disadvantages -

1) The application is tied down to one particular form of authentication.
2) The application developer needs to concentrate on how to get the user authenticated - something in which they might not have an expertise.
3) It is highly cumbersome to change from one form of authentication to another form of authentication.

JAuthentic hopes to address these problems. It will enable application developers to know exactly what they need to know - has the user been authenticated or not. It allows application administrators to configure authentication logic in whatever way they would want. The framework is pretty flexible on how it gets the configuration information. Application administrators can add customizations at multiple levels. For example, one particular implementation may choose to load a configuration from CSV file. Another implementation might choose to display different authentication method for different users based on their preferences. All these logic can be coded by an application administrator around jAuthentic framework and the framework still insulates the application developer from having to know all these details.