Metacat

By default, Metacat supports the use of LDAP as an external authentication

mechanism.  It does this by supplying a class (``AuthLDAP``) that implements

authentication via an external LDAP server.  However, administrators have the 

choice of replacing LDAP with a different system for authentication because 

Metacat is written such that this Authentication provider is replaceable with 

another class that implements the same interface (``AuthInterface``). As

an Administrator, you have the choice to provide an alternative implementation

of ``AuthInterface`` and then configuring ``metacat.properties`` to use that

class for authentication instead of LDAP.