I haven't done much in perl for quite a few years now. This weekend, I needed to write some program that talks to LDAP.

I initially decided to do it in Ruby. I searched around and found Ruby's net/ldap library. I downloaded it and started to play with it. Everything looked fine for the first 5 minutes and it was easy to use, but when I tried to use the API to search for entries on LDAP, I simply couldn't got it to work - the return code always indicated that the search was successful, but the result set is empty all the time. I was pretty sure that I were using the library as supposed, but...

After a hour or so, I thought that that was a waste of time. My purpose was to have a piece of program that talks to LDAP and do things, and I don't care whether it's written in Ruby.

I searched for libraries in various languages, and when I landed on Graham Barr's Perl Net::LDAP on CPAN, I decided to give it a try.

Within 5 minutes, I got it talk to LDAP, and when it comes to search for entries, it worked great. After couple of hours, I completed the entire program and got everything I wanted.

Perl is old for sure, and I don't neccessary like everything about Perl, but it gets the job done for me, in this case and in many other cases.

Graham Barr did a great job to create the Perl LDAP library. It is easy to use, easy to understand and it is OO.

CPAN is a great treasure.

Peter (Guo) Pei

In reply to It all comes down to one thing - whether it gets the job done by PeterPeiGuo

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