Ldap.js

Ldap.js(ldapjs.org)

123 points by vier 14 years ago | 15 comments

stdbrouw 14 years ago |

I did a lot of work with LDAP half a year ago, and the concept of ldap.js was the first thing that sprung to mind as a way to make the whole experience more developer-friendly. Only I was too lazy too actually go ahead and build it... kudos to Mark Cavage for pulling this off :-)

There's just something very wrong about having to use 90s database technology solely because people like (or are stuck with) the associated protocol.

blocke 14 years ago | |

And you're running this all on 1970s technology. And the problem is?

Look at the bright side: At least it isn't an Oracle product.

ecaron 14 years ago | | |

For everything from applicant tracking systems to databases, I often think "at least it isn't an Oracle product." Seems like some other company could use this given enough of us already think it.

I know this will be down-voted for being a Reddit-esque comment, but it was worth it.

charlieok 14 years ago | |

I wouldn't call LDAP "90s database technology" because a much better word choice would be "directory". The data is arranged in a tree, in very much the same way directories on your local filesystem are arranged in a tree.

I think the primary use case is to allow user records for a site to be very distributed, therefore fast and highly available. DNS for people/accounts, maybe.

It's even web friendly, in the sense that ldap:// identifiers are urls.

You might be able to argue that it was a NoSQL solution over a decade before NoSql was cool, however :)

http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/ldap-directories-the-for...

acdha 14 years ago | | |

"90s database technology" in the sense that it's hard to work with and the support costs are unnecessarily high. The protocol is hard to work with - which makes debugging less appealing and thus most people avoid trying - and no server I've seen with the arguable exception ActiveDirectory has well-designed logging for typical sysadmin needs.

Beyond that everyone other than Microsoft uses the OpenLDAP code, which has a number of basic errors and rough-edges. slapd has numerous deadlock conditions and the only backend which doesn't have a low risk of corrupting your data (MySQL) is discouraged. The client libraries had basic design failures for aeons - the most glaring being the assumption that the network is perfect and will never drop or delay packets (timeouts are checked after blocking operations return, which takes several days due to retries at multiple levels). This means that OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, etc. clients will become unusable if your LDAP server is less than perfect - and since slapd deadlocks under normal use, this will occur sporadically. The developers were largely in denial about this - my patch to set SO_RCVTIMEO / SO_SNDTIMEO was ignored with unproven claims that this would magically work in the bleeding-edge trunk version (untrue then, could have changed now) but the libpam-ldap maintain is more conscientious so the similar patch there was accepted a couple years ago so at least Linux clients actually attempt to failover.

stdbrouw 14 years ago | | |

Honestly, whether you call it 90s database technology or 90s directory technology doesn't really change the fact that it's a pain to work with.

I read the Engine Yard story before, and it's a really good evaluation of where things went wrong for LDAP.

stdbrouw 14 years ago |

Also (almost forgot), for people looking for straight-up MongoDB integration, EDS should work out of the box: https://github.com/master/eds

username3 14 years ago |

https://github.com/joewalnes/node-ldapauth

novumordo 14 years ago | |

For those interested, node-ldapauth covers a very small, specific set of use cases. I had to heavily modify it to work with my LDAP server. ldap.js looks much nicer and I wish it existed 6 months ago.

nodebunny 14 years ago |

Awesome idea! I just got node.js installed so I'll keep this one bookmarked

chrisbroadfoot 14 years ago |

Wish I had this when I was using JScript to extract stuff from Active Directory.

shudder I still have bad memories of GetObject("LDAP://

georgefox 14 years ago |

Relatively off-topic: The API and Page Contents menus open and immediately close for me in Firefox. Chrome works fine.