Chapter 22. Directory-Enabling Existing Applications
Chapter 21, Developing New Applications, described the process and benefits of developing new applications that use your directory service. The basic idea is to leverage your deployed LDAP directory and bring its benefits to your users. But what about existing applications? They can also benefit from being directory-enabled. Often it is easier to persuade people to use a new release of an application they already use than it is to get them to try a new application. Therefore, it is often advantageous to directory-enable an existing application instead of writing a new one. If the application to be modified has a split client/server, or thin client , architecture, you may be able to LDAP-enable it by making changes only on the server side and thus avoid the need to deploy new software to end users. Most Web (HTML- and XML-based) applications can be LDAP-enabled in this way. The usual motivation for directory-enabling an existing application is to add new features that use LDAP, or to change an existing feature to use LDAP instead of an application-specific database. By leveraging a deployed LDAP directory service, you may be able to improve the end- user experience and reduce system administration costs at the same time. The first section of this chapter gives some reasons why it makes sense to directory-enable an existing application. Next some advice is provided to help you easily and successfully directory-enable applications. The last portion of the chapter includes two concrete examples that show how to add LDAP support to an application. For general information on the software development kits (SDKs) and tools that can be used to integrate your applications with LDAP, refer to Chapter 21. |
EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 242