A few days ago, I had written about the interesting similarities between Microsoft Cardspace and the way Weave works. This post is about the other interesting feature - the auto login. The idea is to save the user name and passwords on the weave server, retrieve them when we are on a login page and submit it.
If you unzip the xpi file, you can look for the LoginManager.js file. This is the file that is responsible for saving user credentials, retrieving them when required and submitting the form. Most functions are self explanatory. An observer is called whenever a form is submitted. The credentials are then picked up and saved to the store.
The _fillForm function is looks for matching logins saved for the login form and fills in the details. There is some complex logic that determines if a password is correct or not, but it can be ignored for now. It is something like the form.submit() function that I was searching for, but unable to find. I was also wondering how the extension handled password submission for sites like meebo.com that hash the password before sending it across. Watch out this space for updates on how these login form oddities have been handled.
