Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)
- Snippet from Wikipedia: Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP ) "is an Internet protocol for accessing directory information services that act in accordance with X.500 data and service models" the full description of which can be found in the "Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) Technical Specification Road Map" RFC 4510 and its references
Despite its name LDAP is much more than its protocol ( ie much more than its HTTP API) it includes specifications of the required operation of systems satisfying its HTTP API and even specifies a standardized model of the data to be used by the HTTP API and managed by the directory service
Directory services play an important role in developing intranet and Internet applications by allowing the sharing of information about users, systems, networks, services, and applications throughout the network. As examples, directory services may provide any organized set of records, often with a hierarchical structure, such as a corporate email directory. Similarly, a telephone directory is a list of subscribers with an address and a phone number.
A common use of LDAP is to provide a central place to store usernames and passwords. This allows many different applications and services to connect to the LDAP server to validate users.
LDAP is a simpler (lightweight) subset of the standards in the X.500 series, particularly the X.511 Directory Access Protocol. Because of this relationship, LDAP is sometimes called X.500 Lite.
The main components of LDAP are:
- LDAP: The Protocol RFC 4511 an application protocol that runs over an Internet Protocol (IP) network used to communicate with a directory service
- LDAP: Directory Information Models RFC 4512 a specification for systems that implement directory services i.e., "a collection of open systems cooperating to provide directory services"
- LDAP: Schema for User Applications RFC 4519 a standard and extensible data schema for information to be help in a directory service - a "specification of attribute types and object classes intended for use by LDAP"