[lug] Off topic: java form-based authentication in a client program

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Wed, 2006-08-30 at 16:47 -0600, bgiles at coyotesong.com wrote:
> Web services description language, iirc.

That sounds right.

> If you're doing web services you should have libraries that already handle
> all of the grunt work.  

All the WSDL generation is automated through Axis in the build.  The way
I've been looking at this is that the WSDL stuff is just a fancy
wrapping around the RPC mechanisms so my client can make a call to a
class method that is actually on the server without having to do a bunch
of manual connections, etc.  I see everything from a C perspective (my
primary language), so maybe this isn't the right way to view this.

Looking at our client (which I haven't done much until today) it appears
that we used to use methods of the org.apache.axis.client.Stub interface
for logging in.  We have a class that extends the Stub class and then
simply calls setUsername and setPassword (it was set up for BASIC
authentication).  Then we call a method in our stub class to do
processing.  I guess that when the call to our method is made, the login
information is passed along with it and used each time.  Sounds like
with form-based authentication I need to login first using HttpClient
(or similar ) and then save the session information in the stub class
instead of passing username/password manually with each method call to a
service on the server.

Does that sound about right?  Do I just save the session information in
a "session" property?  There is a maintainSessionSet field in the Stub
class but nothing for saving the session directly.

I'm reading up on HttpClient now.  The first thing I noticed was the it
doesn't explicitly support form-based authentication.  It only
explicitly supports BASIC, DIGEST and NTLM.

> Establishing connections, marshalling and
> unmarshalling objects between POJOs and XML, etc.  You have the Sun JWSDP
> (Java web services development p???), right?  

Um.  I dunno.  I got Java 1.4 and JBOSS.  Not sure where to look for
JWSDP.
-- 
Michael J. Hammel                                    Senior Software Engineer
mjhammel at graphics-msue.org                           http://graphics-muse.org
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