The existence of a worse thing does not justify a bad thing.

wpietri · on April 28, 2012

What makes it so bad? I haven't looked at it in a while, but I don't remember having a beef with the original LDAP:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1777.txt

arethuza · on April 28, 2012

I think while LDAP may qualify as "lightweight" the fact it uses ASN.1 BER does, in my opinion, make it fail the "simple" test.

wpietri · on April 28, 2012

For what it's worth, the "lightweight" here is not an assertion that it is lightweight in an absolute sense. It's a modifier on OSI's Directory Access Protocol: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directory_Access_Protocol

It's hard for people to imagine now, but at the time the Internet was just one of many competing network standards. Had this been developed after the rise of the web, I'm sure it would have been a very different protocol.

kragen · on April 28, 2012

LDAP was, in fact, developed after the rise of the Web. By Netscape!

(And SMTP, gopher, and finger were developed before the rise of the Web.)

wpietri · on April 28, 2012

Definitely not true. The first LDAP implementation was published in 1993, and was worked on for a while before that internally at the University of Michigan:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Howes

The first real browser, Mosaic, was released the same year.

Eventually Howes went to Netscape, but Netscape didn't exist until 1994, and Howes didn't join them until 1996