And the L in LDAP means "Lightweight"! Maybe its just in there for comedic effect.
Why nobody uses LDAP
11–20 of 38 posts
Re: Why nobody uses LDAP
#12I never understood why these services are not simply working over HTTP.
Re: Why nobody uses LDAP
#13I never understood why these services are not simply working over HTTP.
There's nothing in principle stopping you from storing that data in Redis or CouchDB.
Re: Why nobody uses LDAP
#14As someone who has had to maintain a midsized openldap setup I can only agree wholeheartly: The day the LDAP dinosaur dies will be a happy day. LDIF is sort of bearable once you found proper tooling (ldapvi!) and overall the whole thing looks quite sensible and usable at first. For a few minutes. Right after installing slapd and adding your first organizationalPerson. A few hours later, after wiring up a few applicat…
The Kerberos reference is a nice touch.
Re: Why nobody uses LDAP
#15As someone who has had to maintain a midsized openldap setup I can only agree wholeheartly: The day the LDAP dinosaur dies will be a happy day. LDIF is sort of bearable once you found proper tooling (ldapvi!) and overall the whole thing looks quite sensible and usable at first. For a few minutes. Right after installing slapd and adding your first organizationalPerson. A few hours later, after wiring up a few applicat…
I recently integrated my companies LDAP server with OpenSSO, which also meant integrating Suns LDAP schema and everything, and it was working just fine.
Maybe it's openldap that sucks? Never used it, though.
I don't know why LDAP is bad, it's quite a perfect tool for certain situations, that would be a nightmare with SQL and even more so with NoSQL.
That there are a lot of RFCs is the major negative point the OP makes and there is no reason this is a bad thing, too. The OP just had his first look into RFCs i guess. There are plenty of RFCs for every protocol in use (IMAP for example, even sieve filters have several RFCs).
It's good to have RFCs to look things up, i don't see the negative point here.
Re: Why nobody uses LDAP
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
LDAP is a protocol, not a data store. I agree that you could implement a LDAP directory services server using a NoSQL database.
It's a particularly ugly protocol, if you ask me. I hacked and slashed and swore and got it working for a company I worked for several years ago, but it was not a pleasant experience.
You probably had no experience, the wrong tools and thus a negative experience.
Do you have specific things in mind?
Re: Why nobody uses LDAP
#17Some NoSQL system might make a very interesting replacement for LDAP.
That'd be awful:
LDAP is a protocol. NoSQL is a shitload of software that works extremely different and has no protocol or common data scheme. LDAP is probably most used for organizing a companies data (employees) and works quite well for that. It's proven, it has major software products that are stable and used in worldwide deployments.
Just exchanging LDAP with NoSQL makes no sense and is a move only driven by "LDAP sounds soo old. Let's use that NoSQL everyone is talking about!". And maybe slap XML, Web2.0 and HTML5 on top of it. Just, you know.. it's state of the art!
I've yet to see a comment on this page that relates to the problems of the protocol. Mostly vague points without objective data.
Basing all those criticism on the fact that this protocol has been around or a while and thus has more than one RFC is just stupid.
Re: Why nobody uses LDAP
#18Nobody as in "every company, small and large, I've ever worked for in the software, automotive, telco and banking industry". Also, ActiveDirectory is an LDAP at the end of the day. RedHat just started their own LDAP server with the old Netscape sources a few years ago.
I agree that getting started with LDAP when you are only used to relational databases is a real pain. On top of that, a lot of software with "LDAP support" is pretty bad at it. But once you have it up and running, you can integrate it with almost everything. I'm a big fan of the Sun LDAP Server and all its features like multi-master replication, ACLs and all those neat ways it offers you for modeling your directory data.
Also: "LDAP was originally intended to be a lightweight alternative protocol for accessing X.500 directory services through the simpler (and now widespread) TCP/IP protocol stack." (wikipedia) So that's what that lightweight is all about.
DO NOT mix up LDAP and "single signon" (e.g. kerberos) which are two separate things. You can use LDAP, however, to store your users and passwords and have all kinds of systems use that for authentication and authorization but that is not single signon. Most SSO products I know use LDAP as their datastore, though.
I have always liked LDAP for its strong standardization and simplicity and LDIF is a plain, simple format that you can easily generate or type by hand. There is not a lot of overhead.
Re: Why nobody uses LDAP
#19Re: Why nobody uses LDAP
#20Having worked with over 40 start-ups over the past three years who use LDAP, I have to ask how you define the term "Nobody". That being said, I think LDAP is just as awful as all of the other centralized technologies that came out of old-guard academia in the '80s and '90s.