RE: NTLM authentication to an MS Exchange web page account using HTTP Client V2.0

[Roland Weber <RO...@de.ibm.com>]

Hi Andre-John,

> I have just got my friend to try connecting to out intranet web server 
with
> Safari and it does not support NTLM authentication. The only two web 
clients
> on the platform that do suppor it are Mozilla variety and Internet 
Explorer.
> Though I can't confirm whether they use the user's logged in 
> credentials, since
> he logs in to his portable with local authentication and then connects 
to the
> servers on a case by case basis. As for 'JDK with HttpUrlConnection'I 
have not
> yet tested this. It may turn out to be a Windowss only solution.
> 
Thanks for the information.

> Thinking about it, I believe the ideal solution would be to create an
> authentication factory, which would return an instance of an 
'authenticator'
> (my made up name), based on specified name. This would allow us to have 
the
> flexibility of either returning a pure Java instance of an 
implementation
> (if possible) or one that has a native implementation. If an 
authenticator
> could not initialise itself for the given platform or environment, then 
an
> Exception would be thrown. How does this sound? - note: 2min design 
process
> 
Sounds great. Use *.httpclient.auth.CredentialsProvider as the interface 
for
the 'authenticator' and you're almost there :-) The factory will become 
very
ugly though, because of all the platform specific checks.

cheers,
  Roland