The UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java version 0.9.6 has just been released. This post details some of the changes included since the previous 0.9.5 release. See the release notes for additional information. If you’d like to be notified by e-mail when a new release is available, send a message to ldapsdk-announce-subscribe@unboundid.com.

Some of the changes in this release were based on feedback we received regarding the LDAP SDK. If you have suggestions or other feedback, feel free to send your comments to ldapsdk-support@unboundid.com.

Intermediate Response Messages

The LDAP SDK now includes support for LDAP intermediate response messages as defined in RFC 3771. Intermediate responses make it possible for operations return multiple responses to a single request. A new IntermediateResponseListener interface has been added, and clients can use the LDAPRequest.setIntermediateResponseListener method to be notified of any intermediate responses returned for the operation.

AuthRate Tool

A new authrate tool has been added as an example program. It is similar to the existing SearchRate tool, except that when retrieving an entry it can also perform a bind to verify the user’s password. It supports simple authentication, as well as the CRAM-MD5, DIGEST-MD5, and PLAIN mechanisms.

CommandLineTool Example Usages

The CommandLineTool API has been updated so that it is now possible to provide examples in the usage output. All of the example tools provided with the LDAP SDK now provide example usages.

Connection Pool Connection Expiration

It is now possible to define a maximum age for connections included in a connection pool. If a maximum age is defined and a connection in the pool has been established for greater than this length of time, then the connection will be closed and replaced with a new connection.

Connection and Connection Pool Statistics

A new LDAPConnection.getConnectionStatistics method has been added which can be used to retrieve an LDAPConnectionStatistics object with information about how that connection has been used. This includes the number of times the connection has been established and closed, the number of times each type of request has been sent, the number of times each type of response has been received, and the total and average response time for operations.

A new LDAPConnectionPool.getConnectionPoolStatistics method has been added which can be used to retrieve an LDAPConnectionPoolStatistics object which can be used to retrieve information about how the connection pool has been used. This includes the number of connections currently available, the maximum number of connections that may be available, the number of successful and failed attempts to create new connections, the number of connections that have been closed as defunct, expired, or unneeded, the number of successful and failed attempts to retrieve a connection, and the number of valid connections released back to the pool.

This feature was suggested by Philip Peake.

Connection Pool Health Checking

A new LDAPConnectionPoolHealthCheck API has been added which makes it possible to perform health checking for connections in a connection pool. It can be used to perform checks to determine whether a connection is valid when a new connection is created, checked out, released back to the pool, or after an exception has been encountered while processing an operation in the pool. In addition, a background thread will be used to periodically invoke health checks against all available connections.

A health check implementation has been added which can be used to verify the validity of a connection by retrieving a specified entry from the directory server. It can assess the connection’s availability based on whether the entry can be retrieved and the length of time required to retrieve it.

This feature was suggested by Philip Peake.

Improved Interaction with DNs and RDNs as Strings

A number of convenience methods have been added to the DN and RDN classes to make it easier to deal with them using their string representations. This includes the ability to determine whether a string represents a valid DN or RDN, to compare DNs and RDNs based on their string representations, and to determine whether strings representing DNs have a hierarchical relationship.

This feature was suggested by Felix Gaehtgens.

Improved LDIFReader Performance

The LDIFReader class has been updated to improve its performance when reading entries containing an attribute with a large number of values (e.g., a static group). For a single-threaded test case involving reading group entries with 2000 members, the new implementation was measured at over 360 times faster.

This problem was reported by Felix Gaehtgens.