One of the things a commercial application needs to protect intellectual property as well as avert piracy is a licensing component. As the application I’m managing is a java based web product we naturally needed a java based licensing framework. Our answer was found in TLC – an open source licensing framework that offers everything from license creation to license verification.

The tutorial(s) leave a little to be desired from a custom implementation perspective, but after several emails to the creator (note: send emails to the mailing list, not him directly!) we were able to get past the issues left unclear by the tutorial. The framework makes it so simple to use a private key store to generate a license and then distribute your application with the public key store for verification of the license.

Our implementation in a web application utilizes a servlet filter to read the license file, verify it and then install it. It’s really quite simple and we ended up with only four class files to implement. A SWT client was created to generate the licenses for our purchasing and trial customers.

Another note: the framework also included support for a ‘free trial period’. We chose not to use this as we wanted to keep a strong grasp on where our application was installed, but the ‘ftp’ option looks promising.

Anyone in need of a licensing framework for java, check TLC out!