Hi Brett!
Thanks for your feedback to Groovy LDAP. Currently, I regard it as a
proof of concept library. We have added it to the sandbox (and web site)
in order to see whether there is some interest. And at least you are
interested (some others already provided as well) :-)
Brett Heroux wrote:
I have a couple of observations:
1) Grails is THE Groovy application and any successful Groovy library
should be able to be packaged as a Grails plugin.
I must confess that I do not know exactly what a library makes a Grails
plugin. For me it is important to minimize dependencies, so the base
library should be independent from Grails. Providing it as a Grails
plugin in addition as well seems interesting.
2) Closures are nice, but the real power of Groovy is in its
collections, which can be made to look like closures by typing .each
3) So far, Groovy LDAP supports basic authentication, a pluggable
authentication would be nice
4) Groovy LDAP doesn't have a caching mechanism, these are easy to
implement and would also make a nice addition
Finally, I think the mission may be somewhat flawed, JNDI already does
this and the reason there is interest in an alternative is because
people, at least, I, want to have an abstraction from LDAP. Writing JNDI
or even Spring LDAP is tedious, error-prone and time-consuming. A
library that doesn't at least attempt to abstract those three things
away is not going to get my interest.
The question is: What is the target group of the library? LDAP people
like us don't want to hide LDAP functionality with a library like JNDI,
which uses strange names (bind for adding entries, for instance) for
common functionality.
For me it would be OK if the library is easy to use for the main 80% of
the use cases, and allows advanced functionality as well.
I am interested in your project, and I tried to be constructive. I do
have some experience with Groovy and LDAP, the yagll (yet another
Groovy-LDAP library) open source project on codehaus.org
<http://codehaus.org> is mine and I have worked with Spring LDAP,
gldapo, JNDI and absolutely love Apache Directory Studio.
Currently, I do not have much time and Groovy LDAP was a one-man-show;
therefore the development of the library did not make progress in the
last months.
But it would be great to work together, design a road map for the next
features and add them to the next release (which would be the first
official release anyway). Perhaps also an option for you to enter our
team ... Are you interested?
Greetings from Hamburg,
StefanZ
