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Re: PATCH: back-sock
Brian Candler wrote:
P.S. Aside: it struck me after originally writing this code that if you're
going to use openldap in this way, all that it is doing is acting as an ASN1
to back-shell protocol converter. In that case, your backend script might as
well just talk ASN1 instead of back-shell. I even went as far as
implementing this - but in Ruby, as it would be far too painful in Perl.
<http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-ldapserver/>
Yes, that was my initial reaction to seeing your description. I.e., you
must write your external module to be a relatively complete LDAP server
that speaks LDIF instead of ASN.1. It strikes me that this isn't
necessarily the most wonderful thing to do.
To me the notions of "externally scripted module" and "production use"
are mutually incompatible. You use a scripting backend to prototype an
interaction, and if it needs to perform well in production use you
rewrite it in C. The reason I find back-perl interesting is because I
can change its code on the fly, with very little up-front effort, which
makes it easy to test ideas rapidly. If I need to write a listener and
various other server infrastructure before being able to do any useful
work, the costs go up and I might as well just write an overlay on top
of back-null. Indeed, with the overlay mechanism I haven't felt the need
to use back-perl in a very very long time.
--
-- Howard Chu
Chief Architect, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com
Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc
OpenLDAP Core Team http://www.openldap.org/project/