CATCHA was Re: Erlang port to the Java Virtual Machine

[Yariv Sadan]

> Getting a CATCHA into yaws is something I have been looking at as well in a
> desultory sort of fashion...
>
> It seems to me that C would probably be the language of choice - the
> selection/response of text for obsfuction part would be straight forward in
> Erlang, but the graphical munginess and distortion/colourbanding of fonts-as-
> beziers must be a solved problem in some C library - but which one?
>
> Any thoughts from someone less idle than me would be welcome ;->
>
> Gordon
>

Hi Gordon,

Yes, I sort of had the same issue in mind when I started looking at
easily integrating with Java. I know of jcaptcha, which does the trick
(http://jcaptcha.sourceforge.net/main.html). The reason I looked at
Java rather than C is because jinterface actually seemed pretty easy
to use, Java is easier than C (the performance difference isn't very
relevant here), and Java has a library for almost everything in the
universe (well, so does C, but at least Java wins on the ease front).
The solution I had in mind would be to have a CAPTCHA server written
in Java that communicates with Erlang over jinterface. When yaws needs
to display a CAPTCHA, it would send a message to the CAPTCHA server
and get back the binary CAPTCHA plus its textual meaning. For
efficiency and speed, yaws, could request a number of CAPTCHAS at once
and cache them for future requests.
If you have any other ideas in this area, let me know!

Thanks
Yariv