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LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol -- a fact we learned from a Yahoo! search that took us to a category called LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), located in part of the Computers & Internet hierarchy. Apparently, LDAP is an up-and-coming acronym that hasn't made it into popular parlance, yet. We headed to the LDAP FAQ for a definition. Here's an answer to the first part of your question: (Warning: If you suffer from jargon allergies hit the back button on your browser now.) "LDAP is a client-server protocol for accessing a
directory service. It was initially used as a front-end to X.500, but can also be used with stand-alone and other kinds of directory servers." Uh-oh¿ We headed off to Whatis.com, a friendly encylcopedia of information technology terminology. Clicking our way from "L" to LDAP, we learned a little more. LDAP lets you "locate organizations, individuals, and other resources such as files and devices in a network, whether on the Internet or on a corporate intranet," and whether or not you know the domain name, IP address, or geographic whereabouts. An LDAP directory can be distributed among many servers on a network, then replicated and synchronized regularly. An LDAP server is also known as a Directory
System Agent (DSA). LDAP was developed at the University of Michigan; it's "lightweight" in contrast to DAP, a part of the older X.500 directory protocol for networks. It is both simpler and less secure, hence lighter. It can be used to route email in large organizations as well as look up people and machines across public or private networks. Many current email clients, including Microsoft Outlook, Eudora, and Netscape Communicator, use some form of LDAP database to look up email addresses. Internic and Infospace are two examples of big public look-up services built with LDAP. If this has whetted your LDAP appetite, visit the informative LDAP Roadmap & FAQ, the OpenLDAP Project,
where you can help develop open implementations of programs with names like slapd and slurpd, or the always dapper LDAP Central.
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