Decommissioned! An Unformatted Hate Email Was Enough For A Popular Node.js Project

A lack of time, usage and an outrageous email led LDAPjs core maintainer to decommission it. When people will learn to format their code?

James Sumners is one of the most respected figures in the Node.js wide community due to maintaining multiple essential projects.

Among this projects you know for sure Fastify, a light Node.js web server or Pino, fast json logger, he was involved also as a core maintainer of PL/JSON.

He’s B.Sc., Mathematics accomplished at Clayton State University / US.

Since August 2019 he also maintains another Node.js gem: LDAPjs:

LDAPjs provides a framework for building LDAP servers, and a client to interact with standard LDAP servers, for applications built with JavaScript on Node.js.

LDAP is a communication protocol:

The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP /ˈɛldæp/) is an open, vendor-neutral, industry standard application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) network.[1]

It’s a standard used broadly by many organisations to discover and connect devices like servers or printers.

LDAPjs specifically is an implementation of the protocol for Node.js. That way Javascript developers can build services utilizing this LDAP easily.

Among companies and projects that use LDAPjs we can find Seagate, Tracktr, Infiscal, Homarr, OpenSign, and Amazon.

That list only some of the companies and there are many many more.

We’re talking about successful, open source project with wide usage, 1.6k stars, 402 forks and 68 contributors.

Unfortunately today James Sumners decided to archive the project. It means that in that state, project does not accept any new contributions but is still available online.

I was thinking maybe it got deprecated or wasn’t used at all. But it’s used and is actively developed. Last version is from December 2023 what is natural for long standing, mature…