Protocol Action: Lightweight Directory and String Representation to Proposed Standard

[IESG Secretary <[e-mail]>]

  The IESG has approved the Internet Drafts "Lightweight Directory
  Access Protocol" <draft-ietf-osids-lightdirect-03.txt> and "The
  String Representation of Standard Attribute Syntaxes"
  <draft-ietf-osids-syntaxes-01.txt> together as a Proposed Standard.
  This protocol is the product of the OSI Directory Services Working
  Group.  The IESG contact persons are Russ Hobby and Erik Huizer.

Technical Summary

 Lightweight Directory Access Protocol

   This document specifies a lightweight Directory Access Protocol. The
   tremendous interest in X.500  technology in the Internet has lead to
   efforts to reduce the high ``cost of entry'' associated with use of
   the technology, such as the Directory Assistance Service (by M.T.
   Rose) and DIXIE (by T. Howes). While efforts such as these have met
   with success, they have been solutions based on particular
   implementations and as such have limited applicability.  This
   document continues the efforts to define Directory protocol
   alternatives but departs from previous efforts in that it
   consciously avoids dependence on particular implementations.

   The protocol described in this document is the first of a series of
   protocols designed to provide access to the Directory while not
   incurring the resource requirements of the Directory Access Protocol
   (DAP). This protocol is specifically targeted at simple management
   applications and  browser applications that provide simple
   read/write interactive access to the Directory, and is intended to
   be a complement to the DAP itself.

 The String Representation of Standard Attribute Syntaxes

   This document specifies a string representation of Standard
   Attribute Syntaxes. The lightweight directory protocols require that
   the contents of AttributeValue fields in protocol elements be octet
   strings.  This document defines the requirements that must be
   satisfied by encoding rules used to render Directory attribute
   syntaxes into a form suitable for use in the lightweight directory
   protocols, then goes on to define the encoding rules for the
   standard set of attribute syntaxes defined in X.500 and RFC 1274.

Working Group Summary

   After the two independent but non-interoperable lightweight access
   protocols from M.T. Rose and T. Howes, this was definitely an issue
   for standardization. 

Protocol Quality

   A LDAP server (now integrated into the ISODE package) and LDAP
   libraries developing clients on various platforms have been developed
   by the University of Michigan. A client for Macintosh has been
   developped bu the University of Michigan, a client for MS/DOS has
   been developped by Brunel University (UK) and a client for Unix
   systems has been developped at UCL (UK).

Greg Vaudreuil
IESG Secretary