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Tcl Client interface for LDAP
I have just committed a Tcl client interface for LDAP. It is under
contrib/ldaptcl, and is a standalone Tcl extension. It should build
with most versions of LDAP client libraries (UMich, OpenLDAP, and
Netscape SDK). Recent testing has been with OpenLDAP, on a Sun
Sparc running Solaris 2.5, so mileage may vary on the others.
It requires Tcl8.0 or greater to build.
I have found the interface to be quite solid, performing thousands
of searches per day for weeks on end, with little or no leakage.
There are many other enhancements possible, as well as supplemental
packages, such as a general purpose LDAP directory browser/editor,
additional interfaces to the LDAP API, etc. A test suite to prove
the LDAP tcl interface would be nice too.
For those of you unaware of Tcl, it is an extensible scripting
language initially written by Dr. John Ousterhout while he was at
UC Berkeley. Major support has been contributed by Sun Microsystems.
Recently, Dr. Ousterhout spun off his own company called scriptics
(http://www.scriptics.com).
The Tcl community consists of around 100,000 developers. Other
Tcl extensions include Tk (graphical widgets), other databases
(eg. Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Postgres, mSQL), and the list goes
on.
With the occasional questions of "how do I import or export data
to LDAP from this or that other thing", or "how should I write
a user interface to LDAP" that's more customized than the standard
ones, using Tcl/Tk and the LDAP client commands will be excellent
solutions for many.
NeoSoft's involvement goes back to the beginning (about 10 years ago)
in which Karl Lehenbauer developed what is currently one of the most
used extensions to Tcl, called "Extended Tcl", or TclX. Karl is in
fact the original author of the LDAP interface, while I have fixed
a few bugs and added an enhancement here and there. TclX and many
other Tcl extensions may be found in the NeoSoft Tcl Archive, at
http://www.neosoft.com/tcl.
Enjoy,
Randy Kunkee
NeoSoft Inc.