Is there a way to setup a sendRedirect() URL to result in a POST to that URL? I know I can set the contentType to "application/x-www-form-urlencoded", but I'm not sure how I'd set the Method to "POST" and how I'd stuff in a parameter that I'd like to send along.

The root problem I am trying to solve is having a user login page that exists on www.host.com (running on server 1), which then validates the user is allowed into the application, and then redirects that user to the one of several other web servers that has all of that user's data, such as app1.host.com or app2.host.com, etc.

In our case, because we can have lots of users, we don't want to attempt to stuff everybody's data into one huge database. We don't want to have a bank of web servers load balanced in front of a single clustered backend server fronting a single huge database. So, I'd like to be able to authenticate the user (that service will have a large number of rows, but they will be fairly small -- containing a user id, hashed password and the server that contains the user's data), then redirect them to the correct server. In doing so, I'd like that server to be able to trust that the user is actually logged on, so I'd like to pass in some credentials from www.host.com to app1.host.com with a redirect so that app1 can be sure that the user really did come there from a valid logon from www.host.com (it's possible that app1.host.com is not even in the same city as the server where www.host.com resides).

I don't think that an encrypted, base64 encoded authentication piece will fit in a standard URL query string because of their length limitation.

Thanks for any thoughts... David