CORBA-ised backend

["Mark Wardle" <wardle@doctors.org.uk>]

I'm just a little interested in the use of LDAP to provide an interface to a
myriad of different disparate applications within the enterprise. This means
I'm interested in providing an LDAP-like interface to my application, so
that users can browse and search my custom data (in this case medical case
notes).

I know that LDAP was originally purely an interface to X.500, and so is
modelled on a front-end/back-end combination, but I already have written a
backend. Whilst I have read some documentation on how to create a custom
backend, it seems to me sensible to create a more generic solution and
strictly define a CORBA IDL, allowing programmers to easily add
LDAP-interfaces to their data-schema simply by implementing the required IDL
interface.

In this way it is quite straightforward to plug in different back-ends, that
may be distributed across different systems, or even written in a different
language, and federated across different systems.

My problems are thus:

   o documentation that details how LDAP requests are passed to the backend
   o what do people think of standardising the interface between the
front-end
and back-end of the LDAP system using CORBA?
   o has someone already written a CORBA-LDAP backend that just creates an
ORB/POA and then passes on requests in a standardised fashion?

Many thanks,

Dr. Mark Wardle
wardle@doctors.org.uk