Since I tend to work quite a bit at home, for the company or just for myself, I need to work off the Business Intranet quite some times.

This causes some problems when you are developing certain functionalities like a LDAP authentication mechanism in my new SOA Platform (I will blog about it in a later stadium). One of the problems is a lack of a LDAP server (how surprising).
Usually this should not cause any problems since most types of servers are found online and have portable versions suitable for Windows, the OS I am currently stuck with.

However, LDAP is a different story. OpenLDAP, the most used implementation appears to be linux only and the windows port approximates ancient. Thus we had to look onwards for an alternative. After one and a half hours searching I found the Apache Directory Server (http://directory.apache.org/apacheds/1.5/index.html)
, which seemed a blessing at that time.
Currently I am toying with it and seeing what it can do, it looks like a good product but the learning curve is a bit steep since no GUIs are installed with the product. This has dampened my enthusiasm somewhat but I have just downloaded Apache DS Studio (based on Eclipse) and will see how it all works out..

In my next blog item more about this!