LDAP, Databases and Distributed Objects: Towards a Better Integration

For the needs of web platforms (portals, e-commerce, telephony on Internet, etc) and network platforms (switches, routers, SCPs, etc), organizations manage more and more data using LDAP servers. LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) [20] is the standard, proposed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for modelling and querying network directory information, as well as accessing network directory services. It also provides a set of services to manage authentication and security. For web and network applications, both LDAP servers and traditional databases are now used and will continue to be used, leading to big interoperability issues. As stated by IETF [13] we are faced to the integration of LDAP and Database technologies to provide a "highly distributed and scalable network database service". Moreover, in the management field, DMTF is promoting LDAP as a key technology to manage heterogeneous network nodes, leading to another integration challenge; how to provide a "LDAP view" on objects. In this paper, we analyze these new requirements and overview some of the studies currently done by France Telecom and PRiSM to better integrate LDAP and Databases technologies, as well as to integrate LDAP and OMG distributed objects.