LDAP

[Harry Singh]

Hi Gurus,
I have just started started learning LDAP.but i m not sure about certain things like whihc server i need for LDAP.do i need additional server or will API's like JLDAP do the same thing.How much is JNDI diff from LDAP? what additional software should i need for LDAP server or client.
Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Harry

[Michael Ernest]

LDAP is a protocol, not a product. Microsoft calls their LDAP product Active Directory, but I don't know much about it. I am most familiar with iPlanet Directory Server (to be called Sun ONE Directory Server in the next release). Directory Servers are complicated creatures, and not all that easy to understand.
JNDI is not a kind of LDAP. JNDI allows you to write "lookup semantics" that can be applied to a variety of different service types on the backend -- even a file system can be addressed as a lookup system through JNDI. So after you've written some JNDI access code, it's conceivable that you could change the directory server you're using -- or even move to a completely different kind of lookup system -- and your JNDI code would largely remain intact.
I took a quick peek at JLDAP; this seems like a more direct approach for learning purposes and might be a better starting point. You'll possibly appreciate JNDI more once you've done things this way for a while.

[David O'Meara]

As above, but I'll add that the IBM implementation of LDAP is called SecureWay (and I'm not a fan), and there is a free version called OpenLDAP, which comes with some Linux distributions (well, I know it came on the RedHat CD's I have). I've installed OpenLDAP but haven't had a chance to play yet.
There is also the Netscape version called Netscape Directory Server and this is a nice one. I only had a chance to use it in a fairly superficial manner, but it behaved nicely with large amounts of data (unlike SecureWay!)