Seattle based non-dogmatic Artist / Programmer type human. Web developer with Mozilla Corporation. Fan of PKO. Spell check is for the week.
I want to share a new architectural pattern for web applications and services that Mozilla has been using to empower the user and put them back in control of their data and their web.
An Example
I use’a the Gmail,
I use’a the LinkedIn,
Why they no’a work’a together? — Mario
Well Mario, if Google and LinkedIn used the IUSEA [...]
Our amazing community has localized the BrowserID service into 28 languages.
If you are a website who is using navigator.id to authenticate your users, you
don’t have to do anything special, your users will start having a better experience… today.
Woah, that just happened.
I wanted to share a little bit about the people and the technology.
People
Mathjazz did [...]
IT, Operations, Security and Webdev have prepared a BrowserID adoption plan for our LDAP directory. Questions come up frequently, so I wanted to capture the basics of the plan.
In terms of BrowserID adoption, there are three classes of Mozilla websites.
Many webapps that use MoCo’s LDAP instance for authentication and group permissions
Mozillians.org which uses a new [...]
Since Google released the Dart spec today, I wanted to share my speculation on the reason Dart exists: Dart is a new technology to solve a cross-organization engineer people problem, internal to Google.
I have no inside knowledge, but reading between the lines, Google had several sets of engineering efficiency problems.
This is not surprising. Google is [...]
It was 3rd years ago today that morgamic and bretr foolishly hired allowed me to join Mozilla.
But what have you done for me lately?
Here is my upcoming lightening talk for “webengagment”. It covers what I’m working on (and with whom):
Click to focus, Right Arrow to switch slides.
36 months, and I feel like I am just [...]
OpenLDAP gets a lot of things right. It gives developers the opportunity to make really progressive designs which respect a user’s privacy and provides good security.
Unfortunately it also gets many things wrong, when viewed from a web applications perspective.
Three core issues:
Long lived connections
Antiquated schema design
monolithic architecture
Let’s just focus on the last item, the monolithic architecture.
Here [...]
Another way to approach learning OpenLDAP is through the lens of RDBMS. As a MySQL user… here are a few slapd equivalents.
Authentication
Some tools (like slapadd against the config directory) are used via authentication provided by your Operating System (Ubuntu for me, which I think is an odd duck for OpenLDAP).
OpenLDAP’s documentation is leary of Linux [...]
As I’m learning OpenLDAP, it seems useful to draw on programming language concepts to understand the system.
Data from (and the schema behind) a LDAP directory is object oriented and seems to have less of an impedance mismatch between code and data, than the more popular RDBMS.
Structure
Schema definition appears to be highly inspired by object oriented [...]
Here are some perceived problems and recommendations. My recommendations are coming from a total newbie, so they are fairly worthless.
This post is about barriers to adoption and will be the most negative of this series. I will be dropping some fbombs.
Let’s start with some nice things… we’ll get to the constructive feedback soon enough 
LDAP is a protocol, not an API. This is actually really cool and very in-fashion.
LDAP directories are distributed (in more than one way), sweet.
Another cool thing about LDAP is that records can have some flexibility to their schema, but they still have a schema. You can augment a record with an “auxiliary” type. Types can have mandatory and optional elements. Ad-hoc elements aren’t allowed, they must be in a schema. This seems like a sweet spot for some classes of data storage solutions.
For such an ancient and storied beast, OpenLDAP gets many things right. If you were to re-launch it as a new NoSQL project, written in NodeJS, you’d probably get some love. Developer’s love the new hawtness.
Technically these aren’t keywords, but to a programmer just encountering LDAP, that is what they seem like.
Attributes are standardized and have inconsistent and wacky names. As a programmer, I’m used to creating my universe on top of a standard library. A programmer approaching data and data definitions… I make that up as I go, right?
Okay fbombs ahead… click through for the rest of this post.
I’m going to write a series of short blog posts about my nascent experiences with LDAP directories.
I hope to cover the good, the bad, and the fugly of this beast.
Planned posts will include:
Why LDAP isn’t more widely adopted or WTF?!?
LDAP for MySQL peeps
LDAP for OO programmers
Care and feeding for the total newb (tips)
Directory data modeling [...]