2-Way SSL in JBoss 7.1.1

As I tried to setup 2-way SSL in JBOSS 7.1.1, the documentation kept on referring to 1-way SSL (even though it was not clearly stated so). I was looking for a simple configuration that will enable a certificate to be used as authentication and to be used in a 2-way SSL protocol. Given that the documentation was not properly describing how to do this, I found a post pointing to check XSD documents to see what other configuration options are available in JBOSS. As I was simply trying to configure in "standalone" mode, this is what I did:

STS and XSD

It has been a while since I used SpringSource Tool Suite. This has been a terrible mistake on my side as I was forced to use other IDEs. As I was finally giving a choice to re-start using it, I came across an issue that I thought will write about. I'm sure most people already know about this: XSD (for the Spring beans) are no longer included in the distribution. This means that if you are using STS from version 2.7.0 and above, you have to include the proper jar (including the XSD inside the jar) into the classpath. I think this is a good move on SpringSource as I can see why it would make sense for the IDE to help you resolve based on your classpath (i.e. what you are building).

XML Validation within Eclipse

  Working with XML can be a wonderful experience. Most people I know (in the industry) don't consider XSD/DTD validation a task that is challenging enough so as to spend time and/or effort to either learning it or writing to it. This feeling changes rapidly as tooling support (e.g. IDEs) produces hiccups when XML validation generates errors that can not be understood by the same engineering staff.  For example, have you ever had the infamous problem reported through Eclipse's console:

cvc-complex-type.2.4.c: The matching wildcard is strict, but no declaration can be found for element 'custom-filter'.


  By default Eclipse has XML validation on. This means that it will look for a DTD of XSD to validate your XML file. The message above indicates that there's an XML element named custom-filter that can not be resolved with any of the XSD that Eclipse is aware within it's catalog registry.