Throughout 2014 I encountered a lot of cool, new (to me) programming tools. Bourbon, AngularJS, node.js, Homebrew and iTerm2 have all become welcome additions to my toolbox in that time. But there’s one tool among them which I’ve loved the most - Apache Shiro. Shiro is a Java security framework that manages to do the unthinkable: it makes Java security easy. I advocate for it every chance I get, and the responses I get are always positive.