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Communicating with Authenticating HTTP Servers

This chapter describes how to interact with authenticating HTTP servers by taking advantage of the CFHTTPAuthentication API. It explains how to find matching authentication objects and credentials, apply them to an HTTP request, and store them for later use.

In general, if an HTTP server returns a 401 or 407 response following your HTTP request, it means that the server is authenticating and requires credentials. In the CFHTTPAuthentication API, each set of credentials is stored in a CFHTTPAuthentication object. Therefore, every different authenticating server and every different user connecting to that server requires a separate CFHTTPAuthentication object. To communicate with the server, you need to apply your CFHTTPAuthentication object to the HTTP request. These steps are explained in more detail next.

Contents:

Handling Authentication
Keeping Credentials in Memory
Keeping Credentials in a Persistent Store
Authenticating Firewalls

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