Newbie Applet ?

Question

Hello all,
Currently I am in process of implementing a Nokia Checkpoint firewall ( What a P.O.S. ). Part of this involves requiring internal users to authenticate to a web served authentication form on the firewall in order to route through the firewall to one of our remote sites. I was able to get the process working with the native code. But the interface and flow of it is very clumsy. If we make any changes to the server side code checkpoint will void our service contract. Man that stinks. They release software with an ugly and clumsy interface... and then tell you that your support contract will be voided if you try to modify the code. I was hoping you could help me with the following question in relation to this. If you can provide me with some sample code ( Hand holding please ) I would appreciate it. I have a deadline I am working against and this piece is the last stop.
The following is the current process:
1.User goes to https://firewallAuthpage.com:901
2.Screen 1 prompts for username input
3.Click submit
4.Screen 2 prompts for password input
5.Click submit
6.Screen 3 displays notification of successful or failed authentication.
I was thinking a client side Java applet could be used to streamline the process without altering the server side code. Logically the applet would behave as follows:
1.User activates loaded Java applet.
2.Applet input box appears asking for Username and Password
3.Click OK and applet will then pass username and password to https://firewallAuthpage.com:901. (Screen 1 & 2 )
4.Applet box displays result of authentication:
A.If successful authentication applet will display successfully authentication message from screen3 and then automatically minimize into background
B.If authentication fails the applet Username and Password input box will reappear. After X number of failed authentications the applet will notify of failure and instruct them to call helpdesk for further assistance.
Right now I am considering line sniffing the current process to see what the http:// post URL strings look like. Then I would take this information to build a client applet using Swing or AWT that would ask for username and password which would then be URlencoded using the .net libraries and finally formed into a https URL string that the web server expects. Does this make sense? My only experiance with Jave is an intro class I took in 1998?!!!
Thanks, Weggy

Answer 1

I will try to get you some code, but I once wrote a program that read from the URL and parsed that text. That is like you said you should sniff the http calls and then mimic those in your applet.
In my program I was talking to a cgi script on the server, mail cgi. I wrote to the URL the whole http string and then read the output from the cgi/URL. Like I said I will try to dig up the bits of code.
Meanwhile look at the libraries to write and read from a httpconnection like a filestream.