Concerns over allowing plugin access to our private code

Trying to login fails with the following proxy authentication failure:

“The request failed with HTTP status 407: Proxy authentication Required (The ISA Server requires authentication to fulfil the request. Access to the Web Proxy service is denied)”

Obviously our firewall is blocking this request. Speaking to my IT manager, he is reluctant to allow the Koders IDE plugin access to our code and also have access to the internet without knowing what the plugin is going to do.

Can you please describe what the plugin is going to do so that I can pass this information on to my IT manager. Based on this information he will then decide whether to open up the firewall to allow the plugin to make the necessary connection to your servers. Specifically can you give us assurance that our code and any information that could be gleaned from our code will not be transmitted back to your server, in other words the information is kept entirely within the bounds of our private network.

Also, is there some configuration option for the plugin that would allow the necessary authentication settings to be specified?

Thanks in advance Christian Crowhurst

I am the Product Manager for the Koders IDE Plugins. Thank you for trying the Koders IDE plugins and for your post. The plugin is a convenience tool which allows a developer to perform searches for open source code on the internet right from the comfort of their own IDE. However this same search can be performed by accessing http://www.koders.com from any ordinary browser. In fact, the plugin really just uses the IDEs embedded IE browser to display the search results on Windows platforms (i.e. it makes a port 80 request for koders.com). For Eclipse on Linux, Gecko is the embedded browser.

The IDE plugins additionally have the Koders SmartSearch™ feature, which when enabled, performs real time searches for methods and classes as the developer types in the IDEs editor. This feature can be configured to use https instead of http and is disabled by default.

The plugin only transmits the following information
* Koders account login and password
* Application identifiers such as the plugin name and version
* Search terms (only method and class names for SmartSearch) and filter (e.g. language, license) settings.

The Visual Studio IDE plugins on Windows XP should work seamlessly with proxies as they use the same settings as Internet Explorer. Theoretically if you can already access http://www.koders.com from IE, the VS plugin should be functional. However the Eclipse plugin requires minor configuration as described here. Please see this FAQ for more general information on proxy configurations.

Dianna DeCristo

Thanks for the quick reply Dianna. This has satisfied my IT manager with regard to the plugin. Christian