LDAP taglib: stronger LDAP/XML coupling (was: Re: LDAP taglib password?)

[Jeff Turner <je...@socialchange.net.au>]

Ugo Cei wrote:
> 
> Jeff Turner wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, 2 Oct 2000, Ugo Cei wrote:
> > >
> > > Please consider using the DSML namespace to represent LDAP entries in
> > > XML (http://www.dsml.org).
> >
> > Do you think DSML should be the default markup? I rather like the
> > simplicity of the current default. OTOH, DSML->HTML stylesheets are more
> > reusable, so simplicity of an intermediate XML format shouldn't be too big
> > an issue.
> 
> I do no personally like DSML very much, but since it is at least some
> form of pseudo-standard and it doesn't seem to me that the current
> default offers anything more, I just wanted to present a possible
> alternative.
> 
> While I'm on this topic, what I would really like to see is a taglib to
> map LDAP entries to XML, preserving the hierarchical nature of LDAP,
> something like this:
> 
> <entry dn="dc=mycompany,dc=com">
>   <attribute name="dc">cbim</attribute>
>   <!-- other attributes ...-->
> 
>   <entry dn="ou=accounting">
>     ...
>   </entry>
> 
>   <entry dn="ou=engineering,dc=mycompany,dc=com">
> 
>     <entry dn="cn=John Doe,ou=engineering,dc=mycompany,dc=com">
>       ...
>     </entry>
> 
>   </entry>
> 
>   ...
> </entry>
> 
> What do you think?

That would be very cool. I proposed something like this on XML-DEV once.
The LDAP and XML data models seem very close. Imagine if you could query
LDAP with XPATH expressions, or use a SAX-like API for parsing search
results..

Back to reality, Sun have got a DSML service provider for JNDI:

http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/earlyAccess/jndi/

This allows you to access/modify DSML documents as if they were LDAP
directories. It's only a small step further to use this modified DSML to
update LDAP. Castor (http://castor.exolab.org/) can do this. I'm not
sure how compatible the licences are.

--Jeff

> 
>         Ugo
> 
> --
> Ugo Cei - Consorzio di Bioingegneria e Informatica Medica
> P.le Volontari del Sangue, 2 - 27100 Pavia - Italy
> Phone: +39.0382.525100 - E-mail: u.cei@cbim.it
> 
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Re: LDAP taglib: stronger LDAP/XML coupling (was: Re: LDAP taglib password?)

[Ugo Cei <u....@cbim.it>]

Jeff Turner wrote:

> That would be very cool. I proposed something like this on XML-DEV once.
> The LDAP and XML data models seem very close. Imagine if you could query
> LDAP with XPATH expressions, or use a SAX-like API for parsing search
> results..

The problem I foresee is that the results of an LDAP query do not
necessarily form a tree.

> Back to reality, Sun have got a DSML service provider for JNDI:
> 
> http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/earlyAccess/jndi/

I do not see this as very useful, as it only allows you to use a DSML
document as a data source, and not as output.
 
> update LDAP. Castor (http://castor.exolab.org/) can do this. I'm not
> sure how compatible the licences are.

Castor is cool, but aside from licensing issues (which shouldn't be too
thorny: Castor uses a BSD-like license that is very liberal, like the
Apache license), I don't think we need Castor just to produce DSML from
LDAP via a taglib, for now.

Just to test these ideas, I've put together some code of my own and
Alain Ketterlin's LDAP Taglib
(http://dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr/~alain/ldap/). My taglib uses "jndi" as
the namespace identifier (the Java code uses JNDI and is not (or will
not) use LDAP exclusively, so I think "jndi" is more appropriate than
"ldap"), and produces (or tries to produce) a DSML document.

I've also changed the names of some of the input parameters in order to
reflect more closely the JNDI names (e.g. "provider-url" instead of
"server-url"). There is no documentation aside from the source code
itself, so you'll have to figure out how it is to be used from the code.

	Ugo

--
Ugo Cei - Consorzio di Bioingegneria e Informatica Medica
P.le Volontari del Sangue, 2 - 27100 Pavia - Italy
Phone: +39.0382.525100 - E-mail: u.cei@cbim.it