Corbel Desktop and Android App - Jetpack Compose

I'm not a UI guy. I find it very difficult to translate my mental map of a user interface into HTML and CSS. And in truth, I don't have much of a mental map to begin with.

I was getting frustrated with web development, so I decided to start work on a desktop and android app to access Cantilever, that I have decided to call Corbel. It has been a... frustrating... week.

I've taken a Jetpack Compose Multiplatform template, which in theory allows me to write a desktop, Android and iOS application all within the same codebase in Kotlin. I don't care about iOS, and Android isn't my priority, so I've only been building the desktop component.

It has been a slog. I have all all the challenges of UI development, multiplied with my unfamiliarity with the reactive, Compose, UI framework. I don't think well in a reactive way, my mind is still quite imperative. I struggle to keep track of all these mutableStateOf and remember and callbacks. The sample projects are either so simple as to do nothing, or so cleverly engineered that I can't make sense of what's going on.

My priority has been to build the simplest UI that will let me log in, or authenticate, with Cantilever. The UI is done (it's not done, but it exists and it works). So how to authenticate?

I had assumed I could use the amazon AWS Cognito java APIs to log in, but that's proving very difficult. It's no longer considered enough to send a username and password. In fact, AWS makes it difficult, perhaps impossible, to even enable that as an option. I discovered something called SRP, a sort-of password-less authentication protocol, but it's not simple, there's no AWS API available, and I think it relies of users registering with the app, not just logging in - not something I want to consider with Corbel.

So I'm a bit stuck. My only thought now is to perform the web-based token-based authentication that Cantilever currently used. I'd make an HTTPS request in Corbel (via Ktor client?), then launch the Cognito hosted UI in a web browser... somehow?

Auth is hard.

UI is hard.