|
Ten Digit Dialing Comes to the Metroplex WWW@UNT.EDU |
By Mark Wilcox, Campus Web Administrator
A Sojourn to San Jose
I thought I would take a moment this month to talk about my little trip to San Jose, California. The original reason I went out there was to give a talk at the SIGS Conference on JAVA. The talk was on programming Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) applications with the Netscape JAVA LDAP SDK. As a bonus, I got spend an entire day at Netscape Headquarters!
One of the things I have become somewhat of an expert on within the past year is an Internet protocol called LDAP.* I won't bore you with too many details, but LDAP is a protocol that is growing in importance.** It is a necessary "plumbing" protocol like DNS (the service that enables you to type in a name like www.unt.edu and get the UNT home page instead of having to remember the server's number, 129.120.209.1). This also means that it is only exciting for us server geeks.
LDAP is an important protocol to Netscape, though, because they are the leaders in the LDAP server market. And they are centralizing all of their product line around LDAP (having the two guys who wrote the original protocol working for you doesn't hurt). This is not to imply that LDAP is just a Netscape thing. Microsoft, Novell and Sun all now support LDAP in their core products.
This past summer I was nominated to become a Netscape Developer Champion. I accepted the nomination. There are about 15-20 champions total, so it is a pretty prestigious honor. As a champion I agree to moderate a portion of the the Netscape Developer newsgroup (mine is the Directory Developers which focuses on LDAP ) and in return I get free membership in the Netscape Developer program plus a nifty t-shirt, desk clock & free server software (not that big of a deal because UNT, as an educational institution, gets this for free anyway -- but a nice gesture). I have been very active in this group for the past 6 months and now I am writing a regular column for their developer magazine View Source.
Because of my status as a champion, Netscape offered me the chance to spend the day with them. It was very cool. The Netscape 'campus' (about 10 buildings in Mountain View, CA) reminded me a lot of a college campus, except that the college was making money (as opposed to being a non-profit organization :).
What was very strange was that they were asking for ideas about how to improve Netscape's developer site, in particular for LDAP and I was thinking "Hey, this is Netscape. Why are they asking me?". This was also, of course, a big boost to my confidence. It proved that I did actually know something about this Internet and Web stuff (and made me even more annoyed when people who barely knew MS FrontPage, called themselves "Webmasters", as if I could call myself "Doctor Wilcox" because I have seen every episode of ER).
I can also say that I don't think Netscape is going to die soon nor are they desperate. Instead they are repositioning themselves to become a company like IBM in terms of providing services to big corporations for their Intranet/Extranet operations. This is where the real money is to be made on the 'net. That's career advice for ya' :).
And before you ask, no I'm not leaving UNT, at least not anytime soon (San Jose, CA is too far away from family ;). The academic computing environment has too many interesting challenges and a lot more freedom when compared to the corporate world.
Until next time.
Mark
*See the October "Staff Activities" column for more information on Mark's LDAP prowess. -- Ed.