Chapter 4. Valves

A Valve is a Java class that gets inserted into the request processing pipeline for an application. It is inserted in the pipeline before servlet filters. Valves can make changes to the request before passing it on or perform other processing such as authentication or even canceling the request.

Valves can be configured at the server level or at the application level. The only difference is in how they are configured and packaged.

Version 6.1.0 and later supports global valves.