[Greasemonkey] Centralized configuration of greasemonkey user scripts

[Phil Bogle]

Greasemonkey requires manual configuration for each user script that is
installed. This is a hassle for a user who wants a consistent
configuration across several machines, and untenable for an organization
that wants consistent configurations across hundreds or thousands of
machines. 

 

These problems will grow as user scripts become more prevelant. It will
become important to be able to upgrade script versions, to automatically
add cool new (safe) scripts, and to block hostile scripts.  Something
like this is probably essentially if Greasemonkey is to gain any
traction in the workplace.

 

One obvious solution is to push the configuration on to a centralized
server and use the local filesystem merely as a cache.  

 

It's fairly easy to achieve much of this vision without changing
Greasemonkey at all. The trivial "uber user script" at the bottom of
this post has no hardwired logic of its own, but uses XmlHttpRequest to
pass the current URL to a web server that can decide what logic to run
in response to that web page.

 

You can imagine backing with a variety of different web based
configuration tools optimized for individuals, corporations, and groups.
It would also be possible to make the existing Greasemonkey dialogs talk
to the web server rather than the filesystem to record user changes. 

 

This isn't just a tool for IT Nazis.  Imagine being able to have
communities of people sharing script recommendations.  

 

To make this more efficient, we would want to respect the http cache
headers on the fetched script so that it doesn't have to be fetched
repeatedly for the same URL. We would also want a way for Greasemonkey
to ask the server for all of the URL patterns that the server might be
interested in, so that on other URLs the server doesn't need to be hit
at all. 

 

 

// uberuserscript

//

// ==UserScript== 

// @name          Uber User Script

// @namespace     http://www.example.com

// @description   Allow a server to specify greasemonkey user script
configuration

// @include       *

// ==/UserScript== 

GM_xmlhttpRequest

    ({

        method:'GET',

 url: 'http://greasemonkeyconfig.com/userscript?url=' +
escape(document.location),

        onload:function(results) {

            eval(results.responseText)

        }

     });

 

--

Phillip Bogle, Jobster

http://www.thebogles.com/blog

 

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