I have some confusion with how spring security works:

In my application, I need to have a login page for users after which they are redirected back the page from where they came. I went through a few spring security tutorials and read some articles, and the examples work by securing a certain page on a site (managed by the <intercept url ..> tag). Then Spring security will generate a login page (or you can specify your own) in order to access the secured page.

I am confused because I don't want to necessary secure a given page on my site: I want a login page for users to log into after which they have access to elevated features of the site (through spring security's authorization features). My question is: given what I described, what would be the strategy to create this login page which, after login, would grant the logged in user the appropriate authorities?

The hack I thought of would be to create a simple JSP page who's only function is to redirect back to the previous page. Then I would use Spring Security to secure that JSP page. But it seems like there should be a better way of doing this...

Thanks