While LDAP is one of the more powerful protocols out there these days, it's often overlooked and/or dismissed. People want things that are more "buzzworthy", and will impress others more when they say they're using it. But LDAP should be an exception to that rule, since it's not only one of the better, cleaner standards out there for data storage and organization, but it's also easy to use with your PHP applications.

In DevArticles' new piece, Create an LDAP Address Book with PHP, they step you through connecting to a LDAP server to grab some address book information. It assumes that you have LDAP support built into your PHP distribution, and access to a public LDAP directory (or an internal company one, either way). Oh, and for those that don't know: LDAP in its most basic form is a standard way to connect to a database. The database is optimized for read queries. Thus, it retrieves information very quickly, in contrast to additions or updates which are slower.

The code's pretty simple, and they keep it light so you can add on to the script easily later. The whole script can be used to search your LDAP server for a specific user's information, or even just a name (even wildcards!).