Authenticating on Web Sites

["John Stowers" <john stowers gmail com>]

Hey,

I have never really been happy with the current way that we authenticate on some websites, it has a tendancy to open an url in the users browser that they might not notice (which causes a timeout). We have also never really managed to solve our problem with blocking while we wait for a user to log in.

To try and fix this I have added a skeleton web browser to conduit/Web.py

This is actually a abstraction of a web browser with support for gtkhtml, gtkmozembed, and webkit. It is based on code taken from Straw [1] which I adapted to make it gobject based, and somewhat cleaner.

The current system checks the value of the gconf key /apps/conduit/web_login_browser which can be one of "system", "gtkhtml", "gtkmozembed" or "webkit". If it is sytem then conduit behaves as it used to, opens the users default web browser, and polls the try_login function. However, if browser is one of the others the behaviour is/will be
* open the url in a new tab
* wait for the user to login (or give up by closing the tab)
* execute the try_login fuction.

It almost works kind of. I will probbably finish the implementation tomorrow. This brings us lots of cool benefits like a better user experience, and more robustness when login is required over the DBus interface. Please try out TestWebSync and let me know how you get on

John