About the sample application

Although we'll be working through a contrived scenario as we progress through this book, the design of the application and the changes that we'll make to it are drawn from the real-world usage of Spring-based applications. The calendar application allows users to create and view events:

After entering the details for a new event, you will be presented with the following screenshot:

The application is designed to be simplistic, to allow us to focus on the important aspects of security and not get tied up in the details of object-relational mapping (ORM) and complex UI techniques. We expect you to refer to other supplementary materials in the Appendix, Additional Reference Material (in the Supplementary Materials section of this book) to cover some of the baseline functionality that is provided as part of the sample code.

The code is written in Spring and Spring Security 4.2, but it would be relatively easy to adapt many of the examples to other versions of Spring Security. Refer to the discussion about the detailed changes between Spring Security 3 and 4.2 in Chapter 16, Migration to Spring Security 4.2, for assistance in translating the examples to the Spring Security 4 syntax.

Please don't use this application as a baseline to build a real online calendar application. It has been purposely structured to be simple and to focus on the concepts and configuration that we illustrate in this book.