Is LDAP obsolete?

Question

Should I spend time implementing LDAP for authentication in my web application(php)? Is it a 'dead' technology?

If it is what are the alternatives? and, if its not, what are good resources i can use? (books, tutorials)

Answer 1

LDAP is certainly not a dead technology. In web applications in general, perhaps, but we use LDAP authentication for a good deal of our intranet-based applications. So if you think your application might run inside an office somewhere, LDAP would be appreciated more than likely.

In addition, LDAP makes for a good way of abstracting authentication over lots of different means, Active Directory, Kerberos, even normal SQL-based authentication.

Answer 2

It's certainly not dead. Whether you should implement it in you application depends entirely on you user / customer base and what their needs are.

The new hotness however is federated / claims-based identity. These approaches allow you to completely decouple your authentication from your app. Check out OpenID (used on this site) and SAML.