AJAX Instant Messaging Client Contribution - Session Variables - Username Password Authentication

Hey all,

I've paid the developer of Ajaxim (ajaxim.unwieldy.net) to customize it to work with the drupal database structure and a good majority of the work is now complete. I will post the code as soon as the last few bugs are worked out (now we're just dealing with buddylist groups). It interfaces with the buddylist module directly and I'd like to eventually turn it into a module.

One thing I was wondering if the community could help us with in this regard.

1) I think we can agree that it would be best if the user did not have to login first to drupal and then to the AJAXIM client (right now the Ajaxim client makes use of the users drupal username and password directly). To do this we need to pass the $username & $password into the ajaxim script. The developer feels this can best be done using session variables....I tried looking through the documentation to see how drupal makes use of the session variables, but, could not find anything. Can you comment A. is this a good way to integrate? B. How does drupal make use of the session variables? Is the username and password stored in the session variables? Can we store it there?

As well if you have any ideas/ suggestions for this please post away!