Elm Library To Work With LDAP

[OnorioCatenacci]

There may already be such a library. If so, I wouldn't mind hearing about it and working up some reference code. For many of us in corporate America we're stuck dealing with AD and Microsoft. It helps us to sell our companies on the idea of trying Elm if we can soften the blow somewhat by offering them something that works with existing infrastructure.

[mikeonslow]

This is a really interesting challenge. My initial thought was that you would need a middleware of sorts
to pull this off cleanly but it's appears to be possible to connect from JavaScript which means it's likely to connect from Elm (since it just compiles to JavaScript).

Here's a library I found to do this is JS: http://ldapjs.org/ (I'm not familiar with LDAP very much anymore so I'm not sure how proprietary it is).

I don't believe anyone has built this Elm yet but I guess that's the point of this project!

[OnorioCatenacci]

It's my understanding, Mike, that LDAP itself isn't proprietary; it's an open standard. MS in their "embrace, extend and then extinguish" fervor created active directory as an offshoot of LDAP. AD is really what I'm getting at but as far as I know LDAP stuff should work with AD. My quick experiments with Elixir and LDAP seem to be able to connect to the AD server.

…

On Thu, Sep 21, 2017 at 7:08 AM, Mike Onslow ***@***.***> wrote: This is a really interesting challenge. My initial thought was that you would need a middleware of sorts to pull this off cleanly but it's appears to be possible to connect from JavaScript which means it's likely to connect from Elm (since it just compiles to JavaScript). Here's a library I found to do this is JS: http://ldapjs.org/ (I'm not familiar with LDAP very much anymore so I'm not sure how proprietary it is). I don't believe anyone has built this Elm yet but I guess that's the point of this project! — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#6 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAJXFc2wUJAlShK-FwxJScwiSwrqPRGzks5skkOcgaJpZM4Pdwla> .

-- Onorio Catenacci http://onor.io http://www.google.com/+OnorioCatenacci

[jpierson]

Without digging into this it seems to me the main challenges are that LDAP is a protocol that works over TCP/IP and Elm is at least typically a language that compiles to JavaScript run within the browser. So the first question will be whether the intent will be to leverage features such as something like the browser specific Chrome/Chromium TCP support with Elm in the browser or to run the generated JavaScript within node and use the sockets support from Node.

If the goal is to inter-operate with LDAP using the Node stack then there are already JavaScript based packages that could be leveraged and that look well supported at a glance such as ldapjs.

[mikeonslow]

Hi @OnorioCatenacci et al,

It's my understanding, Mike, that LDAP itself isn't proprietary; it's an
open standard

For sure, I was wondering if that JavaScript library was proprietary to a Joyent implementation of the LDAP spec but I'm guessing not as I'm looking more.

I also didn't notice the library is for NodeJS and not client-side JS directly. It also looks like @jpierson found the same library. I can see it being somewhat easy to get a Node example going and then interface that with an Elm front-end.

@jpierson any idea on the support for a connection from the browser? I have to imagine there is because we have access to other TCP protocols like Web Sockets and from my experience, they work pretty well.

Notes:

• If you're shooting for real-world cases, security is also a concern which is something (smart and aware) businesses will take into consideration.
• If you go the NodeJS route, you may want to consider doing a quick proof of concept of the back-end piece before the meetup so that you'll have more time to hack on Elm during it.