Programming fun

[andrewducker]

This week's project was to get started on a program that would let me retrieve friends group information from the LJ servers and display it in the way that I want to (wait and see).

Having not doen any stuff with winsock in a couple of years (and nothing intensive then) and never having dealt with HTTP in the slightest, this was a bit of a challenge.  However I've now got it posting the following (only with my password/username) and getting back a positive response. 

POST /interface/flat HTTP/1.0
Host: www.livejournal.com
Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-length: 34

mode=login&user=test&password=test

Would have taken me far, far less time, only I started off trying to use Microsoft's Internet control, which theoretically would make things much simpler, unless of course you wanted to do things different to how Microsoft wanted you to.....

Now I've got stage 1 working I want to switch across to using encrypted passwords and then the XML interface.  And _then_ wrap it all up in a nice DLL that I can give away to anyone that wants to do their own front end.

Comments

[deadprogrammer.livejournal.com]

I had a very similar experience recently. I hate controls.

[andrewducker]

I like them when they work. But i had to quickly write a Winsock server to see _exactly_ what was being passed through by the client before realising that all the wrong headers were being included.

Sigh.

[cx650.livejournal.com]

"Would have taken me far, far less time, only I started off trying to use Microsoft's Internet control"

I thought you knew better!

Re: Programming fun

[wolfieboy.livejournal.com]

If you wanted to use Perl, I could help you quite a bit but I suspect that's not the direction that you're heading.

Note that if you get up to the point where you are getting a session key to retrieve things like comments and such then after you have the session key, you have to send it back as a cookie to LJ in the HTTP request with the cookie contents being 'ljsession='.

Re: Programming fun

[andrewducker]

I'm looking forward to getting on to that when I have a moment (next weekend, I suspect).

And I'm doing it in VB because I plan to put together a DLL to do all the heavy lifting so that anyone wanting to do LJ front-end work in any language that can use COM has their life made much easier.

Re: Programming fun

[wolfieboy.livejournal.com]

I've tried using VBA at one point and it hurt too much.

You can write actual DLLs in VB these days? I wrote a C DLL for VB back in VB 3 days but haven't kept up with it since then.

Re: Programming fun

[andrewducker]

You've been able to write DLLs in VB since about 1998 (VB6) - not sure about VB5 (1997).

You simply create a class and set the project type to DLL - dead easy.