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The Analytical Centre Laboratory System (ACLS) is a closed-source software system for managing a scientific laboratory. Its main focus is on providing user account management and billing, and on facility booking, training and access control.

The ACLS protocol library is Java library that allows an external program to "talk" the ACLS login protocol that the ACLS Login app (typically installed on an instrument PC) uses to talk to the server. This allows you to do a variety of things:

• You can write your own ACLS login application (in Java).
• You can use ACLS as an authority for authenticating user / password pairs in another system.
• You can implement a proxy ACLS service to (variously):
  • track instrument login sessions,
  • insulate the instruments from server down-time (using an authentication detail cache), and
  • tunnel the ACLS protocol over a secure channel.

The Eccles application (in the CMM-Data-Grabber project) is an example of a proxy implemented using the protocol library. Other components that use the library include the Benny authentication servlet which maps HTTP Basic Authentication to ACLS, and the Elvis6 and Elvis7 "Realm" implementations for Tomcat.