vasudevram wrote:
> But we also want to have one more level of authentication, before this
> form is shown, a Web server authentication, i.e. when a user tries to
> access the URL http://my.host.com, a login dialog should be shown
> asking for a username and password - not the username and password of
> the Rails app, but one that is handled by the WEBrick server  - as I
> think is possible (not sure) if using Apache as the web server.  Is
> there a way to do this with WEBrick?

Sure, you can just send http basic or digest authentication headers
from Rails or if you hack around a little bit, WEBrick. I just released
a library for http authentication last week, the digest stuff is still
beta, but you can use the basic authentication.

  http://httpauth.rubyforge.org/classes/HTTPAuth/Basic.html

The rubyforge project page is here:

  http://rubyforge.org/projects/httpauth/