In my teens I was obsessed with LDAP and shared authentication across a fleet of Linux machines, it sounded pretty cool. In reality I never actually had to administer or setup LDAP. It was popularised by Microsoft with advent of Active Directory in the 00s (I believe AD came out with Windows 2000 Server).
Those days I didn't really understand the notion of a tree-like directory. Nowadays I'm think we're better served with a SQL queryable RDBMS to store directory-like data, and modernising the query language using JSON over a HTTP(S) transport.
> Nowadays I'm think we're better served with a SQL queryable RDBMS to store directory-like data
Maybe, but most RDBMS' suck a recursive self-referential queries, which mandatory for making a directory system not suck to use.
> modernising the query language using JSON over a HTTP(S) transport
Eh. Modernizing the query language would be nice, but there's a reason most databases don't make HTTP + JSON the primary method by which you interface. Some LDAP systems get absolutely hammered, you don't want a bunch of unnecessary overhead and connection-building to add to it when you really don't need to. Also expressing queries sanely in JSON would be a pain, you'd either just be wrapping a plaintext query in an object or doing something incredibly misguided with trying to represent the query structure as a bad AST using JSON types.
> queryable RDBMS to store directory-like data, and modernising the query language using JSON over a HTTP(S) transport.
Isnt this what identity systems like Azure Entra essentially are? I remember that they were always at pains to point out that Azure Active Directory was not Active Directory and didnt do LDAP.
Those days I didn't really understand the notion of a tree-like directory. Nowadays I'm think we're better served with a SQL queryable RDBMS to store directory-like data, and modernising the query language using JSON over a HTTP(S) transport.