Re: LDAP vs. SQL

[Dmitry Kovalev <mitya@seismic.geol.msu.ru>]

sj2@myflat.com wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am designing a web-site for my company. Its will have technical articles,
> mailing lists, web-based mail, newsgroups, FAQs, user profiles etc.
>
> I want to map the entire site structure on a LDAP server and use the LDAP
> server as my information storage backend. My boss says we should go with
> a Relational Database and that a LDAP server is an un-necessary layer.
>
> Opinions??
>
> Siddhartha

Your boss may well be right, but I understand your point, because what you
have to build is essentially a directory of objects presented at Web. But I
don't think LDAP is good at it - you would need a real object database, or
better a Web Application Server.

- if you are looking for free solutions, I suggest you take a look at Zope:

http://www.zope.org - it perfectly fits for Web sites you mention (see
products like Yihaw Directory there, and many others - you probably won't have
to code much ;)

- if your boss is such a serious person ;) - you may then use one of
commercial WAS products like WebObjects, or Coldfusion, or many others - see
reviews of WAS products online at InformationWeek, NWC etc.


- or you just may code a RDBMS-driven site using good old perl/modperl and
things ;)

BTW, the rest of discussion is not very related to LDAP, and OpenLDAP in
particular, so it probably would be offtopic here ;)


WBW, Dmitry