The UserAuthenticator interface provides operations to authenticate a user's credentials in order to successfully connect to a database. Any user authentication schemes could be implemented using this interface and registered at start-up time.
If an application requires its own authentication scheme, then it can implement this interface and register as the authentication scheme that Cloudscape should call upon connection requests to the system. See the dcoumentation for the property derby.authentication.provider
A typical example would be to implement user authentication using LDAP, Sun NIS+, or even Windows User Domain, using this interface.
Note: Additional connection attributes can be specified on the database connection URL and/or Properties object on jdbc connection. Values for these attributes can be retrieved at runtime by the (specialized) authentication scheme to further help user authentication, if one needs additional info other than user, password, and database name.