What Else Is There Besides OpenLDAP?

The Stunted Leech asks: "I am trying to develop an LDAP interface to an existing customer database and would like to implement a simple LDAP listener that could be queried from e-mail clients. Before everyone suggests importing the data to OpenLDAP or developing a back-end for it, let me just say that it isn't very feasible: I'm the only person assigned to the project, and my company doesn't have the time or hardware resources to maintain an LDAP server. So I'm looking for very simple implementations of LDAP servers, preferably in a scripting language like Perl or Python (we use Perl for CGIs and wxPython for GUI front-ends). I've come across a couple of Java-based ones, but they seemed overly complex - all I need to do is retrieve a contact's e-mail or phone number from our database. Pointers to any sort of simple LDAP servers are welcome, even if they do little more than return the same result to all queries."

Comments

Not much else.

[abulafia]

You could start with the perl-ldap page, for perl. I'm sure Python has similar, but I don't swing that way. Speaking of swing, as you note, Java is not really what you want here, unless you fit a very particular box.

In any case, even Perl's too much for you - why would you write your own gateway when the vast majority of the work has been done for you? I wonder why OpenLDAP is something that you don't want? Resource-wise, unless you're handling a _lot_ of clients or a really pathological schema behind it, you shouldn't have any problems. In terms of administration, it really does mostly run itself. Setup the initial gateway, and you're done, other than having one more service to watch.

I don't know of any simpler solutions, other than "don't use it, then". Maybe I'm misunderstanding.

I do know a lot of people break out into hives when confronted with LDAP. Most of those people don't have much of a background in the theory behind it. I seriously don't mean this as a put-down - I don't have a formal background in the theory, either. All I mean is that it really isn't all that scary once you start doing it. Again, maybe I'm missing the problem.

Hope this does someone some good.