With the core Spring WebFlux concepts covered, we will now get into the crux of this chapter; introducing you to Spring Security for Spring WebFlux based reactive web applications.
As seen earlier, Spring Security in Spring MVC web applications is based on ServletFilter, and for Spring WebFlux, it is based on WebFilter:
Figure 6: Spring MVC and Spring WebFlux authentication approach
We saw Spring Security in detail in Spring MVC web applications in previous chapters. We will now look at the inner details of Spring Security authentication for a Spring WebFlux based web application. The following diagram shows the interaction of various classes when an authentication process kicks in for a WebFlux application:
Figure 7: Spring WebFlux authentication architecture
The preceding diagram is quite self-explanatory, and is very similar to what...