[GnomeMeeting-list] New ILS xml client code

[Paul <paul666 mailandnews com>]

Hi,

I've packaged a copy of my ILS/LDAP XML code as a piece of standalone
code at http://argo.dyndns.org/xdap-0.88.tar.gz
Before I integrate this into GnomeMeeting, I'd be interested if
anyone has any feedback/suggestions or finds any incompatibilities.
It should be simple to install providing you also have openldap
and libxml2 installed. Installation instructions are:
./configure --with-ldap_server=argo.dyndns.org
make
make install (as root)

This will install ils and ils2 in /usr/local/bin and some data
files in /usr/local/etc/xdap with a default ILS server of
argo.dyndns.org

To test whether it has been installed correctly, run:
ils /usr/local/etc/xdap/search.xml
which should return an xml result set from argo.dyndns.org.

When this is integrated in GnomeMeeting, GM will supply
most of the information used to perform the LDAP updates
in the form of XML entities, i.e. email -> you example com,
which you can then choose to override by editing the entities
in the XML file itself. 

Why would you want this?

Well, ILS is merely an LDAP server with a couple of the usual
non-standard microsoft extensions, and netmeeting and ms-portrait
clients, for example, will perform queries and updates in a
very specific manner. If you want to be compatible with them
then you need to provide the information in the right way.
Using this XML code, it provides you with a way of communicating
with any LDAP server in any way you wish without having to
modify GnomeMeeting for each tweak.

Alternatively, if you don't care about being compatible with
them, then it allows you to update any LDAP schema in 
lots of potentially interesting ways. For example, I've extended
my ILS server at argo.dyndns.org with a few extra attributes
that you can optionally use. i.e. <regonly>1</regonly> will
signal to the ILS server that you only want to be visible
in the directory to other people who are also registered
and be invisible to people who aren't registered. You can
also specify a list of named groups to belong to so that
you can search for friends.

I also added a couple of dynamic features so that you
can run a command via the shell when you do a query,
and can also evaluate the contents of an element during
processing. i.e.
<comment eval="y">date</comment> will update the ILS server
using the output of the "date" command, rather than the
string date itself. GnomeMeeting will perform an update
to refresh your entry every 20 minutes or so, and you could
use this to update your entry. In the standalone version,
you could do this via cron.

Anyway, hope people find this worthwhile. Please send me
your comments :)

Paul