Remember me support

It's quite common nowadays to offer the possibility to have an application remember the login credentials of users. RIFE now offers this out-of-the-box when you store your authentication data in a database (there's not much use in remembering people in volatile memory). The only thing you have to do is to update the declaration of your authentication element and to add a checkbox to your login form.

The element declaration has to contain the 'remember' parameter in the 'credentials' submission and a 'rememberid' in- and outcookie. Like this, for instance:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE element SYSTEM "/dtd/element.dtd">
<element extends="rife/authenticated/databaseunpurged.xml">
    <initparam name="datasource"><config param="unittestsdatasource"/></initparam>
    <initparam name="template_name">authentication_remember</initparam>

    <submission name="credentials">
        <bean classname="com.uwyn.rife.authentication.credentials.RoleUser"/>
    </submission>

    <incookie name="rememberid"/>
    <outcookie name="rememberid"/>
    
    <childtrigger name="authid"/>
</element>

The login form can for example by done like this:

<form name="credentials" action="[!V 'SUBMISSION:FORM:credentials'/]" method="post">
<!--V 'SUBMISSION:PARAMS:credentials'/-->
<!--V 'FORM:INPUT:login'/-->
<!--V 'FORM:SECRET:password'/-->
<!--V 'FORM:CHECKBOX:remember'/-->
<input type="submit" value="Login" />
</form>

It's recommended to not allow users to access sensitive data or to perform payments if they are authenticated through remembered credentials. You can enforce this by creating another authentication element and setting the 'prohibit_remember' to true, like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE element SYSTEM "/dtd/element.dtd">
<element extends="rife/authenticated/databaseunpurged.xml">
    <!-- ... same as above ... -->
    <initparam name="prohibit_remember">true</initparam>
</element>

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Authentication database structure changes

To make it possible to correctly implement the 'remember me' feature, a minor change had to be made to the authentication database structure. The following SQL commands need to be executed for the appropriate database:

MySQL

ALTER TABLE Authentication ADD COLUMN remembered BIT DEFAULT 0 NOT NULL;

Oracle

ALTER TABLE Authentication ADD (remembered NUMBER(1) DEFAULT 0 NOT NULL);

PostreSQL

ALTER TABLE Authentication ADD COLUMN remembered BOOLEAN;
UPDATE Authentication SET remembered = false;
ALTER TABLE Authentication ALTER COLUMN remembered SET NOT NULL;
ALTER TABLE Authentication ALTER COLUMN remembered SET DEFAULT false;

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Added redirection element

RIFE now includes the rife/http/redirect.xml element to make it easy to redirect from one location to another. The element supports the following properties:

to

The target where the redirection should go to.

type

The type of the target, according to this property the target value will be interpreted differently. Currently it supports:

• url

  The 'to' value is a regular URL and will be used as a raw value for the redirect (this is the default value if it hasn't been specified).

• element

  The 'to' value is the ID of an element which will be resolved according to the redirection element that you're defining. It van thus be both relative and absolute.

So you can for instance redirect to the URL of the .SOME_ELEMENT_ID element like this:

<element id="REDIRECT" file="rife/http/redirect.xml" url="/redirecturl">
    <property name="to">.SOME_ELEMENT_ID</property>
    <property name="type">element</property>
</element>

or redirect to http://www.uwyn.com like this:

<element id="REDIRECT" file="rife/http/redirect.xml" url="/redirecturl">
    <property name="to">http://www.uwyn.com</property>
</element>

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Support for transparent gzip compression

RIFE can now automatically compress the output of certain mime types. This makes pages being served much quicker and less bandwidth being used. You turn on the compression by doing this in the configuration file of your application:

<param name="GZIP_COMPRESSION">true</param>

By default the following content types will then be compressed: text/html, text/xml, text/plain, text/css, text/javascript, application/xml and application/xhtml+xml. If you want to override these, you can by setting up the appropriate configuration list like this:

<list name="GZIP_COMPRESSION_TYPES">
    <item>text/html</item>
    <item>text/xml</item>
    <item>text/plain</item>
</list>

Note that this compression will only influence content that's being served through RIFE. If you serve static files straight through your servlet engine, you'll have to configure gzip compression in your servlet engine for those files.

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Template engine outputs bytecode directly

Before, RIFE converted templates to Java source code and compiled this with a regular Java compiler. The engine has been rewritten it now generates bytecode directly. The result is that it's not only 12 times faster, but you don't need the availability of a full JDK anymore to be able to modify templates. This is make template engine useful in many situations where only a JRE is present.

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