LDAP, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol

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LDAP, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, a directory service internet protocol runs over Transmission Control Protocol/internet Protocol (TCP/IP) that that email and other programs use to look up information from a server.

Every email program has a personal address book, but how do you look up an address for someone who’s never sent you email? How can an organization keep one centralized up-to-date phone book that everybody has access to?

That question led to development of a standard called DIRECTORY SERVICES which supports the capability to locate certain types of information easily, efficiently, and quickly.

A directory is a set of objects with attributes organized in a logical and hierarchical manner. A simple example is the telephone directory, which consists of a list of names (of either persons or organizations) organized alphabetically, with each name having an address and phone number associated with it.

For example, the entry for Rohit Mehta might have the following attributes:

cn: Rohit Mehta
mail: rohitmehta.linux@gmail.com
telephoneNumber: 9663399899
telephoneNumber: 080-40022300
roomNumber: 353


Lightweight Directory - Directories are kind of like a database but not really. A directory is a specialized
database that is optimized for lookups. Unlike a traditional RDBMS, LDAP is not designed to show
complex relationships between relations. Imagine if 99% of your actions on were going to be simple
"selects", and you wanted anyone, anywhere to be able to do these selects over the Internet. This is
where LDAP excels. Examples of directories are the TVGuide, the phone book, a library card
catalog, and DNS.

"Give me the phone number of John Smith."

"Give me all the tv shows that are on tonight on the Sci-Fi channel."

Access Protocol - LDAP is an outgrowth of the x.500 standard. LDAP is an open standard,
unlike many other proprietary directory solutions. Most of the directory-like solutions that were
out on the market are now very similar to LDAP. Some of these solution providers, Sun and
 Microsoft specifically, have designed JNDI and ADSI APIs so that you can connect with any
 kind of directory service. This is kind of like ODBC or JDBC is to an RDBMS.
 
Cool things you can do with LDAP
 
-Contact Management

-Users and Security

-Image storage

-Document Management

-Store business logic - actual code or SQL statements