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LDAP is often used by organizations as a central repository for user information and as an authentication service. It can also be used to store the role information for application users.
There are many different scenarios for how an LDAP server may be configured so Spring Security's LDAP provider is fully configurable. It uses separate strategy interfaces for authentication and role retrieval and provides default implementations which can be configured to handle a wide range of situations.
You should be familiar with LDAP before trying to use it with Spring Security. The
following link provides a good introduction to the concepts involved and a guide to
setting up a directory using the free LDAP server OpenLDAP:
http://www.zytrax.com/books/ldap/
.
Some familiarity with the JNDI APIs used to access LDAP from Java may also be useful. We don't use any third-party LDAP libraries
(Mozilla, JLDAP etc.) in the LDAP provider, but extensive use is made of Spring LDAP, so
some familiarity with that project may be useful if you plan on adding your own
customizations.