[Openinteract-dev] A few extensions to SPOPS and a comment on the PODs

[Andrew S. H. <ste...@ci...>]

I have a couple things, first I've come up with a new extension for 
SPOPS to allow it to connect to and communicate with Active Directory 
properly.  I mentioned this idea on openinteract-help, but that list is 
apparently dead.  The major difference is that it uses queries with the 
VLV control rather than plain queries because Active Directory sharply 
limits the sizelimit of LDAP queries.  I also added a couple minor 
features to allow the exclusion of an objectClass because Microsoft 
believes that Computers are Users.

I thought I'd mention that in case the SPOPS developers would like to 
comment or see the code before I upload it to CPAN.  I have a few other 
smaller modules for manipulating data in some nice ways that I may also 
release on CPAN.

I've also been digging through the innards of SPOPS and it ain't 
pretty.  The basic extension interface is really elegant, but if 
someone wants to build or extend a driver (such as my Active Directory 
extension or SPOPSx::Ginsu), then he's got some serious code hacking 
ahead of him.  I was wondering if there was any interest in patching up 
the internals of SPOPS to make it more easily extensible and more 
manageable.  I think the framework is already elegant enough that such 
changes could really make SPOPS awesome.  If some of the internals were 
a little better specified and a few more divisions added, extensions 
could concentrate on smaller pieces of the puzzle.

My final comment is that the SPOPS documentation is evil.  It's spread 
far and wide, has too many bugs, and contradictions.  For example, the 
Object-Rules specify that rules should not modify the columns, but then 
SPOPS comes with several Tool modules which do exactly that 
(SPOPS::Tool::DateConvert is the most egregious).

Anyway, it seems to me that SPOPS is a little stagnate, but I think it 
beats the pants off of the likes of Class::DBI and Alzabo.  I'd like to 
help in these areas as I can.  I've got a project where I'm planning to 
use SPOPS pretty heavily, so it'll be to my benefit to make sure SPOPS 
does what I need and I'll have to extend it in a couple more spots, so 
I might as well give back to the project while I'm at it.  This project 
will probably last for the duration of my current job, so this could 
involve some long term interest (multiple years) as well.

Cheers,
Sterling
--
<>< ><> <>< ><> <>< ><> <>< ><> <>< ><> <>< ><> <>< ><> <>< ><>
  Andrew Sterling Hanenkamp
  System Administration Manager
  Computing & Information Sciences
  Kansas State University

  http://www.cis.ksu.edu/~sterling/
  ste...@ci...

   It's not that perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language
   rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool
   has ever done.                              -- Erik Naggum