LDAP domination of the world, (with a little help from SyncML)

So it seems LDAP is everywhere helping me out at the moment.. this time with the holy grail of centralised contacts and calendaring, pushing to my phone over the internet!!!

So here is the deal.. you have a phone, and you have contacts in Outlook, and in Thunderbird, on many different machines... how to sync them..without plugging wires in every time?

The answer, Funambol Open Source... basically its LDAP, pushing to any device with no tweaking.. and through SyncML which all modern phones have... we can sync over the internet.

Some links to get you started.. Funambol Portal, and Schedule World.

LDAP full circle, and an excellent opportunity to talk at the GetTogether

Ha, excellent, my view has flipped completely over the last 4 months or so regarding LDAP. I started off sceptical, and maybe a little bewildered as to why it is a viable alternative to relational DB's back in June. Then talked to Jeremy Quinn, and started to see the possibilities, and more recently, in the last month, I have in fact started to champion LDAP in the workplace !!!

Now finally things have gone full circle, and I have the fantastic opportunity to speak on Cocoon and LDAP integration at the Cocoon GetTogether. I am lucky enough to have the benefit of collaborating with Jeremy on this talk, and have learned a lot from him. I will not spoil the details of the talk.. a sketch is available at www.cocoongt.org. After the talk, we will ensure all slides are available.

At VNU, we are just about to launch a new website for France, part of which integrates with a massive LDAP instance, holding 23 gig of data just for the UK. This was an excellent learning process, and sparked the idea of the Cocoon talk, to try to help out by providing simple, clear documentation for others who might like to do something similar.

Anyhow, watch this space for more info!

LDAP revisited

I had a chat to Jeremy Quinn of Cocoon and Apache fame on Wednesday regarding whether LDAP is in fact an over elaborate death trap designed by a Bond villain... and he was enclined to disagree. Jeremy has worked with both relational DB's and LDAP before, and emphasised that the biggest advantage LDAP has is that it is naturally hierarchichal in terms of organisation. With relation DB's you kind of 'fake' hierarchy, this seems to me to be a valid point. Furthermore, modifying LDAP at any time during a projects history is easy, classes do not need to be re-compiled etc etc, whereas we know how many mechanisms have invented to ease this process when using DB's. Thanks Jeremy, finally I have a glimmer of understanding as to why we should want to use this (not so) new fangled technology in place of a simple Mysql installation! More reading and playing with LDAP to come!!!!!!

Buzzwords, 'cool' technologies, and finding a real use for things

It seems to me, that despite IT being loosely based on science, there is a massive amount of hype over some not so recently emerging concepts, (Ajax for example), and that we sometimes invent too many ways to do the same thing (relational DB versus LDAP. I am not by nature a procrastinator... but I spent a lot of time recently trying to find a use for Ajax within our many varied websites at work, and in trying to decide whether LDAP is better for a registration project than a simple relational DB.

So first, lets look at Ajax. Firstly, we all already know that what was coined as a marvellous new technology has been around for an eternity with varied different names. But Ajax 'sounds cool'. Ajax removes the need for the page to refresh, hmm, provided you pages are quick in the loading... not much of a biggie there I reckon. Don't get me wrong, I can see a place for Ajax in very specialised online 'tools', and I love the stuff the Dojo boys are doing, but it is really hard to find really really real useful uses for this stuff. If I got a quid every time someone said 'and now we really want to use Ajax on our sites', I would be able to give up working... well OK, maybe not, but I would be able to buy myself plenty of beer :-)

Now on to LDAP. Simply... why? Why use this instead of a relational DB? I am no expert on the LDAP spec, I have a great deal of reading to do, but I am already fully aware that nobody seems to be able to give me a concrete answer on why we should use LDAP for our registration project. Can anyone convince me that LDAP is not like an overelaborate and doomed to failure death trap designed by a super villain from a Bond movie? If I ever figure this out, I will be sure to revisit this blog post!