Overview

Introduction to LDAPIntroduction to LDAP

The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is a lightweight protocol for accessing directory services. LDAP defines a message protocol used by directory clients and directory servers. It is a fast-growing technology for accessing common directory information. LDAP has been embraced and implemented in most network-oriented middleware. LDAP has gained wide acceptance as the directory access method of the Internet and is therefore becoming strategic within corporate intranets.

As the number of different networks and applications has grown, the number of specialized directories of information has also grown, resulting in islands of information that are difficult to maintain. LDAP, an open industry standard, has evolved to meet these needs of providing access to a common directory infrastructure. LDAP defines a standard method for accessing and updating information in a directory.

LDAP Advantages

LDAP has evolved as a lightweight protocol for accessing information in X.500 directory services. It has since become more independent of X.500, and servers that specifically support the LDAP protocol rather than the X.500 Directory Access Protocol. The success of LDAP has been largely due to the following characteristics that make it simpler to implement and use, compared to X.500 and DAP:

•Omits duplicate, rarely used, and esoteric features. This makes LDAP easier to understand and to implement.

•Runs over TCP/IP rather than the OSI protocol stack. TCP/IP is less resource-intensive and is widely available.

•Encodes data for transport over networks by using a simplified version of the same encoding rules that is used by X.500.

•Uses strings to represent data rather than complicated structured syntax such as ASN.1 (Abstract Syntax Notation One).

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Chapter 1