Alex Little

I’ve just finished writing my first version of an MSG widget for the Netvibes environment and it’s ready for people to have a play with.

The widget will give you the presence state of your contacts (with “click to chat” option) and notify you when new messages are received.

To add the widget to you’ll need to log into you Netvibes page then select ‘Add Content’, under the ‘External widgets’ section select ‘UWA Module’. Click on the ‘Add to my page’ link, which will then add the generic UWA Module to your page. Then edit the settings for this module so the Widget URL is set to: http://alexlittle.net/blog/download.php?file=msg-uwa-latest.html. You must also ensure the ‘Inline this widget’ box is ticked (else it won’t remember your password).

You can now edit the MSG Widget to set your MSG username and password and then whenever you log into your Netvibes page you’ll automatically be logged into MSG and receive new message notifications and the presence status of your contacts.

OU users: if you normally use your OU network password to access MSG on msg.open.ac.uk, you should create a new password for accessing msg.open.ac.uk (otherwise Netvibes will be storing your OU network password), to do this please follow these instructions.

Please note that currently the MSG Netvibes widget will only connect to the msg.open.ac.uk server, so you must have an account on this server to be able to use the widget. After we’ve done some more testing we’ll extend this so you can use the widget to connect to your MSG-OpenLearn profile.

Feel free to try out the widget and let me have any feedback

Next step (after any bug fixes!) is to see if this widget can be used with iGoogle – in theory it should as they use the same UWA, but I’ve not tested it out yet. And after that, make a Facebook application for MSG…

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

Just looking a creating a Netvibes widget so users could embed a slimmed down MSG client into their Netvibes page, and looking around all the info to do with Universal Widget API (UWA) – seems to be straightforward enough so far – good that the widget will also be able to work with Google & Apple dashboard.

Main issue is going to be deciding exactly what the functionality of the widget should be – my thought at the moment is that it should just show your status, plus your currently online contacts (not in groups??), then if you want to get more info etc (or chat) you’ll need to launch the actual MSG application.

Any suggestions as to whether this is enough/too much etc etc welcome (especially with not displaying the users in groups, and not showing offlien users).