Jan-Piet Mens

Cheers to LDAP and Open source projects, originally uploaded by Ludo P..

From left to right:

Alex Karasulu (Apache DS), Ludo Poitou (OpenDS), Kurt Zeilenga (OpenLDAP Founder), Emmanuel Lecharny (Apache DS), Howard Chu (OpenLDAP), Jan-Piet Mens

The LDAPcon was a great conference. Good presentations, interesting topics and a must have for all that work with LDAP.

These are three of the gents I spent some quality time with:

Howard Chu

Ludovic Poitou

Kurt Zeilenga

I sincerely hope a similar conference, perhaps with additional topics will be held next year. I might suggest to also include some tutorials or technical tracks.

Kostas Kalevras introduced the services they use in the Greek School Network in a short presentation.

Felix Gaehtgens is now giving a very active and fast presentation on How to write highly efficient LDAP Applications and stop swamping the server. Very good.

Later on this afternoon, I'm looking forward to hearing Volker Lendecke of Samba fame.

Ersin Er is telling us about LDAP Stored Procedures and Triggers in ApacheDS, and he is also giving short demos which look quite powerful. For his demo, he is running Apache Directory Studio, an Eclipse application which I must look at a bit closer (in spite of it being in Java).

That reminds me: between a couple of the beers last night, I asked Howard how much work it would be to implement triggers for OpenLDAP, as I'm dying to have that functionality. He answered that it is actually quite easy; about 200 lines of code would be sufficient to trigger the run of a Perl program as a trigger. My mouth started watering, and at least twice I insinuated that by breakfast time he could be ready.

I hope he remembers…

Andre Posner of Sun Microsystems discusses LDAP proxy and virtualization. Virtualization enables "construction" of LDAP answers on the fly, e.g. out of an RDBMS (c.f. an SQL view), whereas proxying is more in terms of load-balancing and fail-over.

After a hilarious "late evening" with Howard Chu, Kurt Zeilenga, Ludovic Poitou and others, this is the morning after. Boy, did we have the odd Koelsch or two served by one of these guys. After dinner I "bought" Howard a few beers (impossible because the social event was sponsored and drinks were free) and he offered to "sell" me an OpenLDAP license.

Well, back to business.

Steven Legg gives us the Highs and Lows of Integrating LDAP with XML. Very potent stuff.

I forgot to mention that Steve Kille is in the audience. Who is Steve? Search for his name here.

Photo: Igor Amelkovich.

Hilla Reynolds, CA Australia, reveals the Secrets of a Seamless Directory Backbone Service, which include failover, reliable recovery, standards, load sharing and adherence to standards [emphasis mine].

Note to self: protos.