Major Description
(from email, with added comments)
I've been looking at the portal permissions and how they are used and think a few things can be simplified and speeded up. If there are no objections to this general direction I will prepare an initial patch.
1. FolderPermission duplicates the parseActions method from PortalResourcePermission, and in fact calls it's copy again. I think this can be eliminated.
2. PortalResourcePermission.parseActions seems to have some rather odd code:
if (token.equals(JetspeedActions.VIEW))
mask |= JetspeedActions.MASK_VIEW;
else if (token.equals(JetspeedActions.VIEW) || token.equals(JetspeedActions.RESTORE))
mask |= JetspeedActions.MASK_VIEW;
I think this can be simplified.
3. I may not have found all the constructor uses, but I think that subject should be removed from all the portal permissions. I haven't found any uses of the constructor including a non-null subject (although I might have missed some). In addition to the resulting simplification, I believe the subject has no place in the permissions. The JACC defined permissions for web and ejb do not include a subject. JACC does allow for unchecked permissions, which are difficult to imagine if the permissions involved may include a subject. I think a generally more satisfactory approach is to rely on the policy implementation to determine the subject itself.
--This requires converting several direct uses of the PermissionManager to AccessController.checkPermission. This is more generatlly consistent with use of Policy to check permissions.
4. Currently each construction of a portal permission involves string parsing to decipher an actions string. It looks to me as if this can occur hundreds of times for a medium sized portal page. Futhermore, this action string appears to be constructed using ad-hoc string manipulations in AbstractBaseElement.checkPermissions(String actions). Similarly, the constraints implementation seems to do an enormous amount of string comparison to match actions. I think that this can be entirely converted to integer masks with bitwise operations. I'd propose to do this in steps, starting with the permissions and working backwards until I hit the contraints implementation, then converting it.
– initial patch completely converts permissions to use mask for runtime evaluations. Constraints remain as before.
5. Some of the constants are duplicated between SecuredResource and JetspeedActions: moved to JetspeedActions only.
6. There are lots of little bugs like wrongly implemented equals methods in portal permissions
7. I've fixed the javadoc in the classes in the patch.
8. This includes the fixes for JS2-472
I don't really know how to test my changes thoroughly. AFAICT they appear to work with my geronimo/jacc integration (latest version will be posted soon).
I apologize for the number of white space changes in the diff. I pressed the "reformat" button in idea. The patch is generated with svk and I have sometimes had troubles applying these with patch so I'm also attaching copies of the source files.