The current implementation of binding-gdata (binding-gdata and binding-gdata-runtime modules) work like this at SCDL file:
*<binding.gdata uri="..." username="..." password="..." serviceType="..."/>* I have some considerations about that: 1) Obviously, it is not a good idea let the user provide his password as plain text. Do someone suggest something here to improve the security? 2) The serviceType attribute specifies the type of service that is accessed. Some possible values are "cl" to Calendar, "mail" to GMail, and "blog" to Blogger. The current implementation uses some classes of GData API to access the services, and this attribute is necessary. However, as the aim of SCA is to make the user's life easier, I believe that the user should not worry about which abbreviation matches with which service. The Google Authentication API for installed applications [1] says that it is necessary obtain an authorization token for a service by sending a HTTP post like this: *POST /accounts/ClientLogin HTTP/1.0* *Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded* *accountType=HOSTED_OR_GOOGLE&[EMAIL PROTECTED] &Passwd=north23AZ&service=cl&source=Gulp-CalGulp-1.05* So, with the token in your hands, you can interact with the service. But, as can be observed, it is necessary to know the service type since it is specified in the header. On the other hand, when someone access the Gmail, it is required an authentication, but after that the user can use other google services like calendar, docs, or blog, without authenticating again. How is it possible? Or the google uses a unique authorization token for all services, or for each service accessed it invokes a new token. So, one way to eliminate the serviceType attribute from the binding.gdata tag is deduce the type of the service by the uri given. But, I am not sure if the uri is a sufficient condition to do it. Thoughts? [1] http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/docs/AuthForInstalledApps.html -- Douglas Siqueira Leite Computer Science Master's degree student of University of Campinas (Unicamp), Brazil
