Guys, has someone set up an application on WAS 7 to authenticate users from a database? 

I've been reading the docs and I'm surprised how hard it is to find out a solution... On JBoss we just need to add some lines to login-config.xml and it's done! 

So far, my options seem to be: 
- to implement com.ibm.websphere.security.UserRegistry; 
- to implement LoginModule (JAAS); 
- to leave behind the security provided by the server (!) and implement it programmaticaly (checking info in session...); 

Any suggestions?

Do u want to setup datasource/J2C authentication?

Alexandre,

You got it right. One has to go through all these steps to set it up. WAS choice for user registry is LDAP, rather than database. I believe that somewhere in the WAS installation there is an authentication module for database ready, but it is provided as a sample, an example of a module, and it is not supported by IBM for production environements (as far as I recall).

Cheers,
Alexei 

If you want to use database, first u need to configure jdbc providers (XA or NON-XA), then configure datasource. It is advisable to configure it at CELL level as all resources(NODE/CLUSTER/JVM) can access to it. Once you configured these steps, go to datasource-> JAAS - J2C authentication data, here u need to provide username/password to access database.

Actually, I believe you need only to implement com.ibm.websphere.security.UserRegistry, and you can use the existing capabilities for JAAS. The "user registry" is loosely coupled from the rest. That's the idea of having a UserRegistry class to implement it.