User Management /Authentication

many of us often encounter the need to have a user management/authentication services.

if you're lucky, the users data is stored in an LDAP (unfortunately it's usually Active Directory).

if not, don't try to re-implement an LDAP. don't settle for short term vision. managing users/groups/passwords/policies is a major task that tends to grow during projects lifetime and eventually you spend a lot of time writing code that you shouldn't have.

instead, use OpenDS - a fully functional open source LDAP server from Sun.

it has all the features you need and a lot more, it's easy to manage(has a nice GUI), easy to extend schema, supports high availability and replication, costs nothing,  and most important - you have your user data store up and running in minutes...

now in order to query and authenticate users use your favorite LDAP framework, I suggest novell's LDAP library.