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Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 14:07:38 +0200
From: Laurent Blume <laurent.blume@infores.com>
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Subject: Re: [users@httpd] using an apache web server as the middle guy

Jason Jesso wrote:

> I am faced with a very awkward problem.  I have a client who connects to 
> some web site to book airline tickets.  I would like them to connect to 
> our apache web server and get the airlines web pages that way.  I want 
> to do this because I want to get the some data into our system (I want 
> to intercept the http data and extract certain data.).
> 
> Can the apache web server act as a bridge between a browser and another 
> web server?  I don't want to replace the apache web server with my own 
> kind of web server.
> 
> So a client connects to my apache web server.  Something (?) there sends 
> (or forwards) the request to the airlines web server and receives the 
> response and sends it to the clients browser.

Basically, this is a proxy configuration, and there is an Apache module 
that does that.

However, since I'm pretty much sure that booking those tickets involves 
an HTTPS connection, you won't be able to see the content.
It's theorically possible to decrypt en reencrypt, but that would make 
any browser scream there is something wrong going on.

You could develop a frontend for your client, with your own forms, that 
accept the data, and then makes its own requests to the other web site.
That would mean interpreting the content of the site's HTML, and would 
need a constant monitoring for change that would break your processing...
That can be done in many ways, CGI, Perl, PHP, JSP, whatever your fancy 
is, but it's not obvious.

HTH,

Laurent


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