Computer Science & Perl Programming

Chapter 63. Net::LDAP

Joe Johnston

Your little black book has become threadbare over the years from frenetic discothequeing, tardy nocturnal appeals to friends for bail money, and other shady Saturday night activities best left to the godless Carter years of double digit inflation and oil embargos. These days, you’re on the go. You’re mobile. You’re wireless. You can’t be tied down to one workstation, but you need your address book to follow you. After all, these are the days of robot maids and personal jet packs, right?

Perhaps you’re the type of person who realizes it’s not all about you. You might be an administrator for a workgroup whose members all need access to the same set of email addresses and aliases. Maybe your workgroup users have an eclectic set of email clients, like Eudora, Outlook, and Netscape. Do you want to maintain three separate address books for each client and then replicate the changes to each workstation? Only if you relish pain.

Centralized network address books, which can be used by client email programs like Outlook or Netscape Mail, are just one example of the kinds of programs that can be built with LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, defined at http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2251.html). In this article, we’ll look at what goes into building just such a program with Perl.

What Is LDAP?

LDAP is a protocol for directory services (database systems designed to allow fast searching against records all in a similiar format). LDAP is optimized to serve information ...