Netvibes UWA authentication
Been playing with Netvibes UWA and trying to create a little MSG widget, but have been having a little trouble getting the authentication to work for MSG.
I think the problem is down to the fact that the MSG login works via get or post params being passed, rather than “http_basic” authentication username & password – which Netvibes uses. As far as I can tell this means that the username and password aren’t passed with the request as ‘normal’ url or form parameters – so the MSG login script complains that username & password are missing. I’ve not yet found a way of getting the http_basic username & password passed over to the processing servlet.
There are few ways I think of to get around this (though none are ideal)…
1) creating an http_basic secured page in MSG which can handle the authentication – however this means having all the usernames/password replicated into tomcat access files, which I really don’t want to be doing.
2) having the user enter their password entered every time they visit Netvibes – again not really an option as it’s hardly the point of having the widget – it ought to just be a case of entering your MSG credentials once and Netvibes stores these.
3) having the password stored as plain text – again not a good option as too much potential for passwords getting intercepted
Another issue is that Netvibes widgets don’t appear to support https requests, so the password will always be sent plain text to MSG 
As I’ve only just started looking at the UWA framework, there may be something I’m missing or doing wrong – so any pointers as to what to do would be very welcome – especially if there are any examples 
Think I may have found out how to grab the username/password from the Authorization header – using the details in this page: http://www.alemoi.com/dev/httpaccess/ – though I’ve yet to actually try it out!
update – yes, just tested this and it works – hurray!! So will now be able to adapt my MSG login service to cope with http_basic authentication, and fix the problem I was having above
Hello Alex. I’m Xavier, from the UWA support crew.
Your problem is interesting. Since you are asking for ideas and comments, may I suggest you to visit the DevNet Forum: http://dev.netvibes.com/ . You will be able to share ideas and opinions with other UWA devs, and let us know about your progress.
Users have already been confronted to this:
http://dev.netvibes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=255
Thanks.
Cheers Xavier – I think I’ve got it sorted out now – my comment above must have crossed when you were posting yours
Anyway, I’ll post it up in the forum you suggest in case others come across the same problem.
Don’t hesitate to let us how you solved your problem
Thanks!
[...] Have been working a bit more on the Netvibes widget, and there’s now also talk of creating a Facebook widget for MSG – but for now I’ll stick with getting just one widget finished. Also managed to update the MSG BuddyXML service so that it can accept the useranem and password as part of HTTPBasic authentication – rather than just as get/post parameters (this was the problem I was struggling with a couple of weeks ago). One thing that’s slowing me down slightly at the moment is that our msg.open.ac.uk died over the weekend and we’re awaiting the engineer to fix it up. [...]