What is the difference between local and centralized web agents?

For the OpenSSO/OpenAM server, two types of Agents exist: J2EE agents and web policy agents. A web agent protects the entire set of resources available on the web server, while J2EE agents only protect reso开发者_JAVA技巧urces within a web application hosted on an application server. Both can be configured as a "local" or "centralized" agent. What exactly is the difference between local and centralized web policy agents?

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When using centralized agent configuration, the configuration is stored in OpenSSO/OpenAM server and the agents only contain a reference towards the server.

When using local agent configuration, configuration is done through the usage of configuration files stored on the agent machine itself. This option is for backwards compatibility with older versions.

See OpenSSO/OpenAM docs for more details.