Using service certificates with Globus Java APIs (jglobus)

Anne Wilson of Unidata recently contacted me about using grid credentials for a long running service. I suggested that she use "service certificates" (definition), but I didn't know exactly how to use them from an application using Java CoG. I looked it up but looks like Anne already has a way to do this or something similar, so I just want to make a quick note about how to do this for future reference.

In jglobus there's the GlobusCredential class. To create a GlobusCredential object from a service certificate (or, more generally, from a certificate/private key pair where the private key is not encrypted), the constructor you use is GlobusCredential(String certFile, String unencryptedKeyFile). From there, it's a little unclear but it seems that you can get a GSSCredential from this by then creating a GlobusGSSCredentialImpl object with the arguments (GlobusCredential, int usage) where it seems a good value for usage would be GSSCredential.INITIATE_AND_ACCEPT.

You would use this approach when you need a service with Globus credentials but you don't want to or can't create a proxy certificate for it over and over again.