Web Applications-Development-SSL requests via https protocol
Introduction
Sooner or later you will need to develop WebObjects applications that work with SSL requests over https protocol. If ssl is configured on your deployment server, you can probably just change http to https in the app entry URL and the app will probably just work over https protocol. However if your application requires security, you cannot just depend on your users typing in a URL that begins with https. Also since SSL encryption adds more load to the webserver, you may want decide that just some pages need to be returned securely over https and the rest returned via plain old http. In any case, you may want to or need to set up your local OS X development machine to support https protocol so that you can properly test your application. This article endeavors to do this in a concise way while referring to 3rd party sources where applicable. Note also that setting up ssl for testing can be a far simpler task (and not really secure) than setting up real authentic SSL certificates for use in a production server.
Development via Apache Webserver
By default, WebObjects development installations typically run via DirectConnect. For https development, we must run thru the apache webserver built in to every OS X machine. So before going any further, configure your WebObjects development environment so that your development application launches and runs thru apache using the host name "localhost".
Configuring Apache for https://localhost
Make the private key and SSL certificate
Normally creating SSL certificates for production use is quite involved, however since we are just doing localhost development and testing, we can bypass all the mumbo-jumbo and create the minimal unpassworded private key and SSL certificate the easy way. Do not use this method for creating production server SSL certificates
Open terminal and follow the commands shown below in my transcript which is self-explanatory if you are familiar with Terminal...
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Next run the one single openssl command that will make the two files we need in their final folder that we just created above.
Note you will be asked for a bunch of info for the certificate. Follow what I have done below. In particular, enter "localhost" in the Common Name field
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Configure Apache2 to Use Your Development Certificates for localhost
/etc/apache2/httpd.conf
making the changes shown in the following 2 screenshots:
Setting Apache server name to localhost
!step1_servernamelocalhost.jpg!
Including SSL Configuration file into main Apache config file
!step2_includesslconfig.jpg!
Next edit the ssl config file itself at
/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-ssl.conf
making the changes shown in the following sceenshot:
Setting up the SSL Config file
!step3_sslconfig.jpg!
Restart apache
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Finally, verify that https is working:
Verify https://localhost is working
!httpslocalhost.jpg!
Detecting SSL
Code for detecting whether SSL is active for the current request:
I'm told this won't work with IIS:
// Is this page being accessed securely?
boolean secureMode = false;
String header = context.request().headerForKey("https");
if( header == null ) {
log.debug( "no https header, looking for server_port" );
header = context.request().headerForKey( "server_port" );
if( header == null ) {
log.debug( "no server_port header found, assuming insecure connection" );
} else {
log.debug( "server_port header found, using it" );
secureMode = header.equals( "443" );
}
} else {
log.debug( "https header found, using it" );
secureMode = header.equals( "on" );
}
log.debug( "secure mode set to " + secureMode );