AuthInvoker class - comments?

[Ellers <el...@ellerton.net>]

Hi all

The company I work for has been ramping up its use of XML-RPC lately - 
there's really a lot of activity going on there now :)

We need to use authenticated connections at the office, although we 
don't need SSL (we just need to know who did what, not that it be 
encrypted).

I may have missed something, but I think there is a need for an 
"AuthInvoker" class.

Normally I can define a handler class, like this:

   public class SimpleHandler {

     public double add( double a, double b ) {
       return a+b;
     }
   }

And then add this class to be a handler as:

   SimpleHandler handler = new SimpleHandler( );
   m_webserver.addHandler ("simple", handler );

Works great.
I can even connect to the server using normal authentication and the 
handler gets called no problem. However, there is no way for the handler 
to get the user/password data, or any other context information.

99% of what I need is in the package - including a XmlRpcContext interface.

But I couldn't see a way for my handler to have access to the context 
information.

So I added AuthInvoker, by copying the Invoker class and changing about 
8 lines.

Now, the SimpleHandler looks like this:
import org.apache.xmlrpc.*;

public class SimpleHandler {

   //
   // NOTE: use of XmlRpcContext object
   //
   public String add( double a, double b, XmlRpcContext context ) {

     double result = a + b;

     // show both the supplied parameter, and the authenticated
     String r
       = "Hi '"
       + context.getUserName()
       + "', identified by '"
       + context.getPassword()
       + "'. The result of "
       + a
       + " + "
       + b
       + " = "
       + result
       ;
     return r;
   }
}

and for this to work, it gets added to the server like this:

   SimpleHandler handler = new SimpleHandler( );
   m_webserver.addHandler ("simple", new AuthInvoker( handler ));

Now, although I know Java "reasonably", I don't know very much about 
servlets and Jetty etc - so I may well be missing something. Please 
shout out if so.


But otherwise, would other users find this useful? It makes it easy to 
access context information from a "plain" handler object, with a minimum 
of programmer effort.

Thanks for any comments :)

Ellers