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Org.eclipse.higgins.hbx
Contents
Overview
The Higgins Browser Extension (aka HBX) is a Firefox extension written in Javascript. When Higgins Extension is installed and your browser lands on a "relying party" (RP) site, HBX manages authentication and other kinds of identity-related interactions between the RP site and the Higgins service.
[Note: At present this Higgins service is hosted, but in the future we will also support a "local" Higgins service installed on the same machine as your browser.]
Operation
The current version of the Higgins Extension has varying levels of support for what we will loosely call RP interaction types. These interactions begin after the browser has done an HTTP GET on some page. The Higgins Extension parses the HTML searching for markers that indicate what type of interaction the RP site supports.
Kinds of RP Interactions
If it finds CardSpace-compatible markers, then this indicates that the RP site supports CardSpace-compatible authentication (sign-in). If it finds RSS-P markers then the site allows the user to "project" identity information (usually non-identifiying attributes) to the site, e.g. to express the user's "shopping" persona (preferences, etc.). If the site is one for which the user's Higgins Service has an "HTML Card", then the Higgins Extension will attempt to fill in forms on that site as well as scrape the users's own personal data from site.
HBX version 0.5.X
- HBX Installation 0.5.X --how to install it
- Note: The HBX update site is currently http://broker.parityinc.net/pip/hbx/hbx_update.rdf We will be changing this shortly to the www.eclipse.org downloads area
- HBX How To Generate New Server Account
- HBX Microsoft CardSpace Support (v0.4.7+)
- HBX CardSpace Test Sites <-- Note version 0.4.5+ gets errors now from Kim's blog site.
- HBX RSS-P Protocol Support (v0.5.1+)
- HBX RSS-P Test Site
- HBX Form Fill
- HBX Screen Scrape
- Implementation
- HBX Source Folders
- Written in Javascript
- Works with Firefox 1.5. Has been tested on WinXP, Linux and OSX
- Debugging tools used: To monitor all POST/Get requests the livehttpheadersextension is useful.
- Don't use HBX and Chuck Mortimore's extension at the same time --one of them should be disabled.
Reference
http://xmldap.blogspot.com/2006/05/firefox-identity-selector.html - Chuck Mortimore's Firefox extension. Chuck and the Higgins team have collaborated a bit on the development of our respective extentions.