/**
 * <p>This is the entry point to the part of the CAS processing that is independent
 * of the user/program interface. This layer is mostly a service to create, manage,
 * validate, query, and destroy tickets. The caller of this layer may be a Web
 * application running in a Servlet container, but it may also be a Web Service
 * client, RMI client, or even a program that finds these services compelling.</p>
 * <p>One first enters this layer with opaque Credentials requesting creation of a
 * TGT. The Credentials are &quot;opaque&quot; because they are an object whose nature is
 * irrelevant to CAS. The Credentials are carried through the layers until they can
 * be presented to plugin configuration beans that may recognize the underlying
 * type and process it. Simple Credentials might be an object with a userid and
 * password, but they may also be an X.509 Certificate, Kerberos Ticket, Shibboleth
 * artifact, XML SOAP header, or any other object.</p>
 * <p>The Credentials are presented to a set of objects plugged into the
 * Authentication process by the system administrators. If one of these plugin
 * elements recognizes the Credentials, validates their integrity, and maps them to
 * the identity of a user in the local system, then CAS has logged someone on and
 * creates a TGT.</p>
 * <p>The results of the login are somewhat opaque. The TGT references an
 * Authentication object that references a Principal. Minimally the Principal
 * contains a simple ID string. What else the Principal or Authentication object
 * contain are transparent to CAS. These objects must be Serializable, because the
 * Tickets and everything they reference may need to be checkpointed to disk or
 * shared with multiple machines in a clustering configuration. CAS is managing the
 * TGT and, as a result, it also saves everything in the concrete classes
 * referenced by it.</p>
 * <p>Any additional information about the User fetched at login is of no direct
 * interest to CAS. It may, however, be meaningful to the caller of this layer. In
 * the case of an HTTP Servlet interface, this would be the View layer that
 * generates, among other things, the response to the Ticket Validation query.</p>
 * <p>Having created a TGT, CAS then proceeds to create Service Tickets which are
 * chained off the TGT, and in the case of Proxy authentication creates chains of
 * TGTs for the Service Ticket. TGTs and STs are stored in a cache until they
 * expire or are deleted. Various technologies can be plugged into the back end so
 * that the Ticket cache is shared among machines or persisted across a reboot.</p>
 * @since 3.0
 */
package org.apereo.cas;

