Re: [Slightly OT] - Great online Openldap resource and book

[Howard Chu <hyc@symas.com>]

Gavin Henry wrote:

> Just for the newbies and maybe the seasoned LDAPer's, a great online
> resource (apart from http://www.openldap.org that is):
>
> http://www.zytrax.com/books/ldap/
They have an interesting perspective on the history of LDAP. When I was 
at UMich back in the 80s and we started playing with X.500 we used to 
have a running joke - "who needs encryption, when you have ASN.1?"

Bear in mind that most of the interesting protocols of the day (e.g. 
finger, ftp, gopher, http, smtp, etc) were human-readable, and plaintext 
protocols with CR/LF input terminators are what most of us working on 
the 'net were used to. The above site's History seems to share this 
disdain for ASN.1 and OSI protocols, but I think that spin is unfair. 
The reference implementation of the OSI stack that we were all using 
(ISODE) was certainly a pig, but that didn't mean that the OSI protocols 
were bad, or that they couldn't have been done better. And ASN.1 itself 
fills a necessary role in network communication, as soon as you try to 
progress from describing simple line-based text to binary, structured 
data, solving the same problems that Sun XDR, XML, and various other 
network data representations try to solve.

Anyway, the authors seem to color some of LDAP's most glaring weaknesses 
as if they were strengths, which I find puzzling.

I guess that's a longwinded way of saying "section 2 in that document is 
questionable..." I haven't read further.

--
 -- Howard Chu
 Chief Architect, Symas Corp.       Director, Highland Sun
 http://www.symas.com               http://highlandsun.com/hyc
 Symas: Premier OpenSource Development and Support