Book Image

Groovy 2 Cookbook

Book Image

Groovy 2 Cookbook

Overview of this book

Get up to speed with Groovy, a language for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that integrates features of both object-oriented and functional programming. This book will show you the powerful features of Groovy 2 applied to real-world scenarios and how the dynamic nature of the language makes it very simple to tackle problems that would otherwise require hours or days of research and implementation. Groovy 2 Cookbook contains a vast number of recipes covering many facets of today's programming landscape. From language-specific topics such as closures and metaprogramming, to more advanced applications of Groovy flexibility such as DSL and testing techniques, this book gives you quick solutions to everyday problems. The recipes in this book start from the basics of installing Groovy and running your first scripts and continue with progressively more advanced examples that will help you to take advantage of the language's amazing features. Packed with hundreds of tried-and-true Groovy recipes, Groovy 2 Cookbook includes code segments covering many specialized APIs to work with files and collections, manipulate XML, work with REST services and JSON, create asynchronous tasks, and more. But Groovy does more than just ease traditional Java development: it brings modern programming features to the Java platform like closures, duck-typing, and metaprogramming. In this new book, you'll find code examples that you can use in your projects right away along with a discussion about how and why the solution works. Focusing on what's useful and tricky, Groovy 2 Cookbook offers a wealth of useful code for all Java and Groovy programmers, not just advanced practitioners.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Groovy 2 Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using basic authentication for web service security


Basic authentication is one of the simplest and thus the least secure authentication mechanism. It sends a combined string, which contains username and password encoded with base64 encoding, inside a special HTTP header. Password and username can be very easily discovered, if the HTTP request is intercepted by an attacker. On the other hand, if a request goes through using the HTTPS protocol, then header discovery is less likely to happen. The combination of HTTPS and basic authentication makes a rather popular choice as a starting security scheme for web services.

In this recipe, we will demonstrate how to use the HTTPBuilder library, which we already covered in previous recipes (for example, the Issuing a SOAP request and parsing a response recipe), to achieve the basic request authentication.

How to do it...

The following steps present how simple it is to inject basic authentication credentials into your requests:

  1. First of all we need to...