Authenticated Sessions at the HTTP level for the iControl API (HTTP Headers?)

I believe the method you are looking for is called setMaintainSession. It is located on the Axis BindingStub objects. Setting it to true will perform the first authentication using HTTP basic auth, then will insert the BigIPAuthCookie (returned in the first response) in subsequent requests. The auth cookie should be checked before HTTP basic auth is attempted. Here is my test code, which is based upon the iControl JAR available on DevCentral (I also had to add the axis and axis-jaxrpc JARs to my CLASSPATH):

import iControl.*;

public class AuthCookieTest {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        iControl.Interfaces bigip = new iControl.Interfaces();
        bigip.initialize("test-ltm-01", "admin", "admin");
        
        try {
            SystemSystemInfoBindingStub systemInfoStub = bigip.getSystemSystemInfo();
            systemInfoStub.setMaintainSession(true);
            systemInfoStub.get_version();
            systemInfoStub.get_version();
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

That should cut down on the TACACS chattiness as only the first call will require a TACACS query for authentication. Let me know if that does the trick.