[Fedora-directory-users] Net::LDAP or Mozilla::LDAP::Conn/Entry for FDS

[Mike Jackson]

Richard Megginson wrote:
> 
> 
> Net::LDAP allows you to use all of the LDAPv3 controls and extended 
> operations by providing an ASN.1 parser.  I personally like the OO 
> interface of Net::LDAP.

Me, too. I like it a lot. It's very clean, and well thought out.


> Mozilla::LDAP is a wrapper around the C libraries, so it is as much as a 
> factor of 10 faster.  So if you need as much performance as you can get, 
> use it instead of Net::LDAP which is native perl.  Also, if you want to 
> use Mozilla NSS for crypto, you must use Mozilla::LDAP - Net::LDAP uses 
> Net::SSLeay which is a wrapper around openssl.

One thing to mention here is that Net::SSLeay does not allow more than 
one concurrent LDAPS handle. Most people don't need that, but worth 
noting anyway...

My reasons for using Net::LDAP are that it is ubiquitous, well tested, 
and well maintained. Another reason is that it's platform independent, 
which can be a real lifesaver if you need to deliver the same code to 
e.g. win32, linux, and unix machines.

I have probably written more than 100k lines of code with Net::LDAP, and 
I recommend that if you are just getting started using perl with LDAP 
that you start to do the same :-) Net::LDAP is drop-dead easy to code to 
and drop-dead easy to subclass, which makes for very rapid development.

When I design a piece of LDAP functionality which needs to be really 
fast I just write it in C to begin with. I don't see much sense in using 
a perl wrapper around C libraries.


BR,
--
mike