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DeveloperNet
University Home > Online Courses > LDAP extensions for JNDI
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LDAP
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) was primarily designed to provide an easy way to interact with directories. LDAP is a lightweight alternative to the X.500 Directory Access Protocol (DAP) for use on the Internet. It uses TCP/IP stack verses the overly complex OSI stack. It also has other simplifications, such as representing most attribute values and many protocol items as textual strings, that are designed to make clients easier to implement.
LDAP is an open standard and Directories need to support the LDAP the LDAP protocol in order to allow software developers to write applications to access the Directory via the LDAP protocol. Software developers can request or submit data through LDAP. For more information about LDAP, see http://www.ldapzone.com.
Figure 1: Example Directory Tree.
LDAP Naming Convention
The LDAP protocol defines a naming convention for objects in an LDAP Directory tree. As a software developer, you must be aware of the naming convention since you will use the LDAP naming convention in your programs.
The LDAP naming convention uses the common name of the object together with the context. The context of an object is the position of the object in the Directory tree. It allows the Directory to explicitly find the object. The common name of the object is the name of the object in the Directory. In Figure 1, user Rbills is the common name for that object. Her distinguished LDAP name that you would use if you were making an LDAP request for her object is: cn=Rbills, ou=development, ou=engineering, o=Acme. This name comes from the name attributes of her objects. The two container objects, development and engineering, are Organizational Unit objects. Acme is the Organization object.
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