You clearly didn't read the link I directed you at. If you had you'd have seen that you only need MD5(username:realm:password), and would have been pointed at JBoss's DIGESTAuth implementation as an example of an implementation that does this.
"You clearly didn't read the link I directed you at." I do believe your tone is rather counterproductive to the purpose of this forum.
I did in fact read the article, and I do now agree that you only need to send MD5(username:realm:password) to the remote server to do the authentication.
The problem that I do see is that it is trivial for a MITM to either intercept the transaction and force the client into a less secure mode (ie. basic auth), and then read in the password, or else just reuse the auth credentials for another transaction.
