LDAP – This week I had an interesting challenge – integrate LDAP (Active Directory, actually) authentication into an existing application (perl based). The main page was actually static html, which linked out to four perl cgi based utilities.

The goal was to add authentication to the company’s internal Active Directory, but only to members of specific groups.

Due to the ease of php’s ldap integration, I replaced the static html page with a php based script to handle the login and menu options. In the Perl code, I added some code to check the sessions against the authenticated users, and grant / deny access.

CodeIgniter – I also had the chance to do a small application in CodeIgniter, my favorite php framework. I also used a CRUD library called “GroceryCRUD”, which makes building the admin side of things pretty fast and foolproof.