Prehistory of LDAP by Colin Robbins

Colin Robbins has published on his blog a “Prehistory of LDAP“, which describes some of the origins of the standard.

All of this predates my involvement with LDAP, directory servers and even X.500, but I feel related to it, since the names, projects or people, he mentions are familiar to me and I had the chance to meet or even work with some of them.

Anyway, for the curious who want to understand the roots of LDAP, it’s definitely worth reading.

Series B…

After a record Q1, ForgeRock has now secured $15M in series B financing.

This is a great news, and is definitely setting us on a great global growth path.

Welcome to our new partner Foundation Capital, and thanks to Accel Partners for the renewed investment.

Devoxx France 2013

DevoxxFR 2013, the conference for passionate developers that took place in Paris France last week , is over and the long easter week-end after it was well appreciated. The 3 days conference has been great for ForgeRock, and so busy for the whole staff that I couldn’t find the time to blog or even tweet during the conference. I spent most of my time on the booth, and didn’t get a chance to see any session. The only sessions I could fully participate in were the JUG Leaders BOF and my own Conference presentation about “Security for enterprises in a cloudy and mobile world” (See the presentation in French, on Parleys). That presentation was well attended and seemed to have caught interest, by judging from the number of questions that were asked during and after the presentation.
LP0_7549Our booth has been busy. We’ve had interesting discussions with developers, architects, consultants about our company, about our products. We met a few members of our community, already using our products, and even customers 🙂
We’ve also discussed with a few engineers interested in the job positions that we have open in our Research and Development center in Grenoble, both in product development and quality engineering.

I’d like to thank the organizers for the great conference. And I hope that we’ll be able to have a strong presence next year.

You can find my photo album from Devoxx France 2013 on G+.

Ready for Devoxx France…

The second edition of the Devoxx France conference is starting tomorrow morning and we’re ready to welcome the 1300+ developers to our booth.

Booth at about 7pm.

ForgeRock booth at 7pm

And the booth at 7:45pm.

Looking forward to a great conference. See you all in the next 3 days.

OpenDJ presented at the LavaJUG

As I mentioned last week, I was presenting OpenDJ and server performances in Java at the LavaJUG on Thursday.
Ludo@LavaJUG

The session was broadcasted live on Google Hangout, unfortunately due to a nice blue screen, in 2 parts. You can watch them here:

Part 1:

Part 2:

The slides are available on the LavaJUG Wiki

Thanks for the great reception to the whole LavaJUG and more specifically to its leaders Olivier Coupelon, Pierre Colomb, Sylvain Desgrais and Thomas Maurel.

Upcoming events: LavaJUG & Devoxx France

I will be at the LavaJUG (Java User Group from Clermont-Ferrand, France) this Thursday from 19:00 to 21:00, presenting our experience with the OpenDJ project with building a highly scalable and high performance server in Java. The presentation is based on what I’ve already presented in a few JUG in France (AlpesJUG, MarsJUG, PoitouCharentesJUG,…) and Switzerland (JUG Lausanne), but has been updated with regards to GarbageFirst GC and the most recent HotSpot JVM.

 

And next week, from  March Wednesday 27th to Friday 29th, you will find ForgeRock at the Devoxx France conference.

Come to our conference session about “Enterprise Security in a Cloudy and Mobile World” (the session is in French). The session is on Friday 29th, from 11:45 to 12:35, in Miles Davis room. Mark it on your calendar, and if you miss it, make sure you stop by our booth (B3) to say hello and talk with some of our engineers. We will also be present at the HackerGarten on Wednesday from 14:00 to 18:00, should you want to have fun with one of our open source projects : OpenAM, OpenDJ or OpenIDM.

DevoxxFR-2013-banniere-texte-600-232

Happy New Year 2013 !

Another year has gone, but the World is still here. Time for new resolutions, wishes and hopes.

On behalf of the ForgeRock Grenoble Engineering Center, I’m wishing you a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year 2013.

Happy New Year 2013.
(cc) 2012 – Ludovic Poitou.

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

But before diving in the details of the blog itself, I’d like to do a short personal and professional review of 2012.

2012 has been an amazing year. We’ve grown ForgeRock at an incredible pace, doubling the staff, globally as well as in France. We’ve moved to new offices, with some extra space to welcome additional stars to our band (yes, we’re still hiring and looking for developers with excellent Java programming skills). We’ve made available 3 releases of OpenDJ, 3 of OpenIDM and 1 major release of OpenAM. However we missed our target of releasing OpenDJ 2.5. With the growth of the team and the company, we’ve made the OpenDJ release more ambitious than originally planned, adding a REST/Json to LDAP service, to facilitate the development of applications that need to access the data. All of it should be available in the coming months.

Blogging wise, I’m satisfied with the ratio of articles published until July, then the workload has impacted my ability to write as often as I would like… Part of the new year resolutions is to resume posting here at a regular pace, similar or better than in 2012. I hope you will enjoy reading and joining the discussion…

Now with the annual report :

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 34,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 8 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

ForgeRock.com 2.0 !

ForgeRock website has just received a new facelift. Check it out !
ForgeRock.com website

ForgeRock France 2nd Anniversary

ForgeRock France was officially formed on October 25th, and so last week we marked our second anniversary.
In the past 2 years, we’ve grown from 1 to 4, to now 7 employees, and we’re still looking for talented software engineers for our research and development center in Montbonnot, France (near Grenoble, just on the edge of the Alps). We have opened positions for Java developers, Quality engineers and experts in Identity and Access Management. If you’re interested, check our website and apply from there.
But more important than the growth of the French part of ForgeRock, I’m really excited by the company as a whole. We’ve grown so much in every way since we’ve started, and it’s visible :

ForgeRock team as of end of September 2012, during our company meeting in Greece.

OpenDJ scripts and utilities on github

Following the exemple of my colleague Chris, I’ve pushed a set of OpenDJ scripts and utilities for that I’ve wrote and used in the past to github.

You will find script for log statistics, converting schema, …

Feel free to use, and if you have suggested enhancements, patches, I’ll be looking for pull request !

“Parlez vous Français ?” @ JavaOne 2012 !

French dinner at JavaOneJavaOne, like most of conferences, serves 2 purposes. First it is the place to learn about the theme of the conference, in the case of JavaOne, the Java platform, language and environment. There are presentations, demos, keynotes for all of that. But more importantly, it is the place to socialize, meet friends and acquaintances, strengthen your network(s).

And so, we had on Tuesday evening, right after ForgeRock party, a “French dinner”. More specifically, a dinner with French speaking persons that are quiet active, one way or another, in the Java community. We, French, do love food and spending hours over a meal discussing, joking, laughing, sipping wine in good company. This year was no different, as the few photos can illustrate.

Thanks to Guillaume Laforge, leader of the Groovy community, for organizing it this year.

LP0_5975LP0_5979LP0_5978

ForgeRock Party at JavaOne 2012

Thanks to all the developers from our open source projects and communities, all the customers and friends that attended the party that ForgeRock threw yesterday on the side of the JavaOne conference. We had lots of fun seeing you, discussing and raising toast to the good old times or to the great futures.

A special thanks as well to James Gosling, father of the Java programming language and supporter of ForgeRock, for showing up and raising the level of the party to an All Stars game !

You can find the photo album of the party on Facebook.

JDuchess @ JavaOne

Yesterday, as I was entering the conference room for our Open Source Identity and Access Management expert panel session at JavaOne, I noticed all JDuchesses were gathering in the corner for a group photo. As I had my camera with me, I quickly took it out and captured the moment.

 

The picture is viewable and downloadable from my Flicker account in all sizes, including the original 12M pixel one. Feel free to use as you want (in compliance with the creative commons license).

Another nice ForgeRock event

Yesterday, on the side of the JavaOne and OOW conferences, we had an executive round table with selected partners, customers and future customers. The event started with a 30 minutes speech by Scott McNealy, Sun founder and former CEO, also active supporter of ForgeRock.

Scott touched on the values and benefits of open source software, gave a top 12 reasons why you know your Identity and Access Management solution is not open source and talked briefly about his new company Wayin.

Mike Wilson, VP and CISO at McKesson, presented how McKesson has started to use ForgeRock Open Identity Stack for several projects and the benefits of our solution.

Thanks Scott, Mike and all for your participation.