LDAP Ate my Brainz
By admin on Feb 19, 2007 in Open Source, Python, Zope
Well, not really. But it if did, it’s okay by me: I really like LDAP. I’ve only had to work with it a little bit in the past, but I have been in deep LDAP immersion for the past 2 months. The thing that really pi**es me off is PHP. Now, that crap DID eat my damn brainz. Fortunately, I was able to do most of the work in python.
This was all for the first draft of http://community.zenoss.com. We were initially just trying to get a mailman-to-forums bridge up, but we needed to integrate with LDAP for our future user management plans. THEN, we found out that the forum software was read-only for LDAP, so users couldn’t manage their data. Thus enter Plone, one phase earlier than planned.
Needless to say, it has been quite an adventure. And minus the PHP, it’s been most enjoyable, if tiring. There are some very cool upshots, though: I will most likely (given the time) 1) be writing a Plone 2.5 + PAS + LDAP HowTo, and 2) writing a Zenoss LDAP HowTo.
But right now, I’m gonna go play some WoW. It’s not like I’ve got any brainz left to worry about…
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Cote' | Feb 21, 2007 | Reply
To the original problem, I really hate how hard it is (or was last I checked) to setup a “simple” mailman instance. I wish there was a nice, self contained application that you could just assign an email account to and it’d archive the messages in clean web page format. That way there’s no “server” to setup, and you just need to add a new “member” to any mailing list to start archiving it.
oubiwann | Feb 21, 2007 | Reply
Coté, I honestly hadn’t ever thought about Mailman being a pain… only the really, really crappy forums software. Not only is pretty much all forum software badly written and krufty, it’s also based on old, worn-out concepts. There are much smarter ways of writing software, but most developers are still stuck in the 80s and 90s. I don’t even want to think about the places the average PHP coders are stuck…
Now that you mention it, and from this perspective, I have to concede your point.
Mailman was written in the mid-90s (if I’m not mistaken); though written in python with code that is stable, easy to read, and in general high-quality, the application architecture is out of date. We are starting to see very intelligent user- *and* developer-friendly methodologies for writing and deploying web services, applications, etc. There’s no reason we can’t re-examine our old stand-bys and give them new life, or better descendants.