Is this project maintained?

[danabr]

A few weeks ago I opened two pull requests, but have not received any reply yet. There are two additional, even older pull requests, that has not been given any feedback either. The last activity from "core team" on the issue list seems to have been in July.

So, is ruby-net-ldap still maintained?

[James Hewitt]

It is maintained, but not very regularly :)

This list is a good way to get attention.

All, I've made some comments on the pull requests that are open at the
moment, and would appreciate some more opinions.

Regards,

[R. O'Connell]

Sort of. Interest in LDAP over the last few years has been sharply declining, especially in the Ruby community who tries to avoid enterprise-y type things as much as possible. There was a big push when 1.9 came out to make it functional since the library was completely broken, but other than that LDAP is generally eschewed in Ruby in favor of simpler things like Mongo for document stores (which LDAP really is) or Redis for simple key-value authentication. I'll try and keep up on patches and bug fixes, but I wouldn't expect a huge push simply due to the fact that LDAP is simply becoming irrelevant.

[clif...@gmail.com]

There's new work by the guys at Joyent for LDAP via Nodejs (which is
much better suited for slow LDAP connections than Ruby w/o EventMachine
anyway). We currently connect to ~15 different LDAP identity providers
at campuses across the country (USA), but having to spawn process pools
which can only handle finite amount of connections per unit memory is
not as scalable as an event-driven implementation that could potentially
support hundreds or thousands with very little memory usage.

I'm still using a basic Rack server for LDAP with ruby-net-ldap, but I'll
probably change that sooner or later to the nodejs version. I like coding
in Ruby much more than JS, but there's not EventMachine implementation of
net/ldap so my options are limited.

http://blog.nodejs.org/2011/09/08/ldapjs-a-reprise-of-ldap/
http://ldapjs.org/

Clifton

[R. O'Connell]

True, and another example on where Ruby used to be the hot new thing that everybody used and all the innovation is, nodejs is now where it's all at these days. I'm not saying LDAP isn't used anymore, but nobody starts a new project using LDAP these days, they're always connecting to legacy or enterprise servers.

This library could be well improved for sure, by changing the query methods to more AR-style finders, refactoring all the tests to modern RSpec standards, using EventMachine instead waiting around for responses blocking the method chain, and so forth. There really is just not that much of an interest.

At any rate the trend toward authentication has been simple central identity servers with a simple, standard protocol like REST to handle the busywork of authentication and hand out tokens to clients instead of mucking around with credentials, like OAuth and it's cousins. So in your case Clifton a simple NodeJS server that handles the busywork of talking to the LDAP servers and passes out authorization tokens would work much better in the long run.

[danabr]

There are lot of systems out there (mail, backup) that uses LDAP for authentication. If you want to integrate with these, LDAP is the sanest way to go. But perhaps you are right in that it is better to create a server fronting LDAP and providing a simple restful API for authentication.

Anyway, I am working on refactoring Net::LDAP and creating better rspec unit test coverage. No new functionality, just better test coverage and DRY internals. I will also see if I can do anything about the integration tests.

Even if the interest in LDAP has declined, I think there should be a working  LDAP client in Ruby (even if simple with limited functionality).