I also ran into these issues when developing my web app and got around them using a couple of methods.
In regard to the t=0, I always send that for OSPi or the OpenSprinkler.
For the tag I parse it out using regex (actually I parse the digits in):
preg_match("/d+/", get_from_os("/sn0"), $data);Also for the password problem, I personally limit the firmware to LAN only. And let my web app handle security/etc on the Internet.
Hope this helps!
Update: By the way, not sure if you are aware but the API used to be vastly different but a lot of work has gone in to bridge the gap. Dan has been instrumental in all of this and at this point we are fairly close. If you want to fix the t=0 discrepancy you can submit a patch to Dan and he might incorporate it into the main code. I personally haven’t found this to be a huge problem since I don’t plan on using the timer feature of manual mode. I prefer run-once in that scenario.