[erlang-questions] Adding StartTLS support to eldap (for use Ejabberd)

[Rory Byrne]

On Tue, Aug 07, 2012 at 08:27:54PM +0100, Gavin Henry wrote:
> 
> >> RFC 4513 is what needs to be read for this work and it's sponsorship, which
> >> also covers the SASL side too.
> >
> > And probably parts of RFC 4511 too.
> 
> Yep, but they should know this one :-)
 
Yeah, yeah, of course they do :-)

> > Actually, the more I look at the ejabberd eldap version, the more I
> > get the feeling that there is no chance that they will opt to use
> > the OTP version as it stands. One of the first things they did with
> > the eldap code was to rewrite it be asynchronous so it can have multiple
> > ongoing requests to the LDAP server at the same time. The OTP eldap,
> > on the other hand, is synchronous - it blocks on each request to
> > the server waiting for a response. Clearly in the context of a large
> > multi-user XMPP server, having asynchronous communication with your
> > directory server is something you'd want.
> 
> Yeah, that's kind of a deal breaker then.
> 
> > I suspect there's a few other useful changes that they've made that
> > they (or you) wouldn't be willing to give up.
> 
> True.

Adding some of these features to OTP eldap wouldn't be too difficult, 
but I'd guess that only a subset of these changes would get accepted. 
And at the end of the day, I can't see ejabberd giving up their current 
flexibility where they can make any changes to their LDAP code as and 
when they need to. 

Anyway, it was good of you guys to offer to sponsor this. Hopefully 
you'll get hooked on Erlang yourself and stick around a while. The OTP 
eldap module is nice clean code and you could have a lot of fun working 
on it - once you find your feet that is. I'm sure it'll be looking a lot 
more enterprise-ready when you get your mits on it! :-)

Rory