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

["Kurt D. Zeilenga" <Kurt@OpenLDAP.org>]

Though I could digress as well....  please note that
the <ldap@umich.edu> list would likely be a better place
to discuss the history of LDAP.


At 06:05 AM 10/26/2004, Howard Chu wrote:
>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