Comments on: Authenticating in GAE

By: Joseph Jude

Joseph Jude — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:50:55 +0000

Joel: I got it working. I’ve shared the code – http://code.google.com/p/mysecs/source/browse/trunk/WndClient/mysecs/googleHelper.py

By: Joseph Jude

Joseph Jude — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 01:14:56 +0000

Thanks Joel. I’ll have a look into these links.

By: Joel

Joel — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 17:53:48 +0000

If you want the client app to make authenticated requests to your appengine site, you can use the token obtained from the auth service to generate the auth cookie. There is a good overview and some sample code on StackOverflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/101742/how-do-you-access-an-authenticated-google-app-engine-service-from-a-non-web-pyt

In appengine you can use the Users API to get the current authenticated user for a request:
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/gettingstarted/usingusers.html

By: Joseph Jude

Joseph Jude — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 03:44:32 +0000

Joel: thanks for your comment. Agreed that the credentials are passed in plain text. Question: In the webapp, how will I know that the request is from an authenticated user? thanks.

By: Joel

Joel — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 22:41:20 +0000

You don’t want to send the user credentials using the header method because appengine doesn’t support SSL, so they are sent unencrypted across the wire.

Your desktop app can communicate directly with the Google accounts auth service:

http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/docs/AuthForInstalledApps.html