LDAP Lightweight Directory Access Protocol is a protocol for networked directories [L1 ].
This page is about both TCL ldap libraries and TCL ldap clients.
As of 2010, the mostly referred to TCL ldap library is the one provided by tcllib: http://tcllib.sourceforge.net/doc/ldap.html
As of 2010, there is no up-to-date tcl GUI client. Legacy TCL project has a collection of TCL programs, among them there is a ldap client more than a decade old.
musashiXXX 2010-May-10 I've written a CGI based interface to LDAP. It was designed for the sole purpose of allowing users to administer a single OU from a web interface. It's very basic at the moment but I plan on developing it further. The tarball is located here: http://nefaria.com/scriptz/tcl-ldap-cgi.tar.gz ... there is no README or instructions (I'm working on that) but if you need any help, feel free to contact me (musashiXXX) on irc.freenode.net #tcl or via e-mail ([email protected]).
There are four independent (?) implementations, ldapTcl, Matt Newman's LDAP extension [L2 ], Jochen Loewer's (see below), a derivative of the latter available in tcllib as of 2004, and Gareth Owen's tclLdap-pkg [L3 ] (but is this a derivative of an early tclLdap?). It would be particularly useful to compare the latter two.
I did a pure Tcl implementation of a ldap interface in June 99. See (Jochen Loewer). It is running since then very nicely to query a large enterprise wide people directory. Right now only the read/query parts of the protocol are implemented. However, the internal ASN layer is there, so it should be rather easy to extend it. Unfortunately I didn't release the code to the public yet. I thought about that several times. It would be ideal for tcllib or even standard tcl (like the http package). CL: ooooo. ASN.1 would be nice for tcllib.
ak: Tcllib head provides an (incomplete) asn package. Directly derived from the code in the ldap package.
Interesting LDAP-based applications include Owen's Ldapper [L4 ] (which pages says it was last modified Wed Feb 3 17:46:54 GMT 1999).
As of 2004, the major category of LDAP servers are instances of Microsoft's Active Directory.
CL observes that learning to work with LDAP can intimidate newcomers, if only for the usual complication of client-server protocols (SNMP presents the same challenge): one must have a working server and client before achieving the "Hello, world" level of progress. In the '90s, there were quite a few public LDAP services, and it was inviting to connect new client applications to them for quick exercise. As far as I know, they're all gone now [task: confirm this]. Is there interest in Tclistan for a public LDAP server against which we can all practice? I might set one up ... (again, same's true for SNMP).
Patrick Finnegan provided several IBM-pertinent example LDAP-using scripts [L5 ] to the Cookbook.
In general, LDAP querying requires quoting of such characters as comma [L6 ].
schlenk The tcllib ldap client package was greatly enhanced in the 1.9 version of Tcllib.
Using LDIF you can for example parse Mozilla Thunderbird Addressbooks, which can be exported in ldif format, see the examples/ldap directory in the tcllib distribution.
LV 2009-Sep-15 Has anyone written a tutorial for learning to interact with LDAP (or even better, Active Directory) using Tcl? It would be nice to have a series of examples starting at something simple like looking for the current user's LDAP information, then on to listing all users along with their phone numbers, etc. and finally a few examples of things like adding a new user, updating an existing user, deleting a user. These examples would really help a novice administrator get started using Tcl.