{"id":947,"date":"2008-04-05T13:19:14","date_gmt":"2008-04-05T21:19:14","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=947"},"modified":"2008-04-05T15:28:47","modified_gmt":"2008-04-05T23:28:47","slug":"through-the-looking-glass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/?p=947","title":{"rendered":"Through the looking glass"},"content":{"rendered":"

You have to like the way, in his latest piece on\u00a0metadirectory<\/a>,\u00a0Dave Kearns summons Lewis Carroll to chide me for\u00a0using the\u00a0word “metadirectory” to mean whatever I want:<\/p>\n

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean\u2014neither more nor less.”<\/span>
\n“The question is, ” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”<\/span>
\n“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty. “which is to be master\u2014that's all.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Dave\u00a0continues:<\/p>\n

Kim talks about a “second generation” metadirectory. Metadirectory 2.0 if you will. First time I've heard about it. First time anyone has heard about it, for that matter. There is no such animal. Every metadirectory on the market meets the definition which Kim provides as “first generation”.<\/p>\n

It's time to move on away from the huge silo that sucks up data, disk space, RAM and bandwidth and move on to a more lithe, agile, ubiquitous and pervasive identity layer. Organized as an identity hub which sees all of the authoritative sources and delivers, via the developer's chosen protocol, the data the application needs when and where it's needed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It's funny.\u00a0 I remember sitting around in Craig\u00a0Burton's office\u00a0in 1995 while he,\u00a0Jamie Lewis\u00a0and I\u00a0tried to figure out\u00a0what we should call the new kind of multi-centered logical directory that each of us had come to understand was needed\u00a0for distributed computing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After a while,\u00a0Craig threw out the word “metadirectory”.\u00a0 I was completely amazed.\u00a0 My colleagues and I had\u00a0also come up with the word\u00a0“metadirectory”, but we figured\u00a0the name would be\u00a0way too “intellectual” – even though the idea of a “directory of directories” was exactly right.<\/p>\n

Craig just laughed the way he always does when you say something\u00a0naive.\u00a0\u00a0Anyone who knows Craig will be able to hear\u00a0him saying, “Kim, we can call it whatever we want.\u00a0 If we call it what it really is, how can that be wrong?”<\/p>\n

So guess what?\u00a0 The thing we were calling a metadirectory was a logical directory, not a physical one.\u00a0 We figured that the output of one instance was the input to the next – there was no center.\u00a0\u00a0The\u00a0metadirectory\u00a0would speak all protocols, support different technologies and schemas, support referral to specific application directories, and preserve the application-related characteristics of the constituent data stores.\u00a0\u00a0 I'll come back to these ideas going forward because I think they are still super important.<\/p>\n

My\u00a0message to Dave\u00a0is that\u00a0I haven't changed what I mean by metadirectory one iota since the term was first introduced in 1995.\u00a0 I've always seen what is now called virtual directory as an aspect of metadirectory.\u00a0 In fact, I shipped a product that included virtual directory in 1996.\u00a0\u00a0It\u00a0not only synchronized, but it did what we used to call “chaining” and “referral” in order to create composite views across multiple physical directories.\u00a0 It did this not only at the server, but optionally on the client.<\/p>\n

Of course, there were implementations of metadirectory that were “a bit more focussed”.\u00a0 Customers put specific things at the top of their list of “must-haves”, and that is what everyone in the industry tried to build.<\/p>\n

But though certain features predominated in the early days of metadirectory, that doesn't mean that those features ARE metadirectory.\u00a0\u00a0 We still live in the age of the logical directory, and ALL the aspects of the metadirectory that address that fact will continue to be important.<\/p>\n

[Read the rest of Dave's post here<\/a>.]<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The thing we were calling a metadirectory was a logical directory, not a physical one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,8,58],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/947"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/947\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}