I have published two new builds of the UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java. The 1.1.4 build is an official release that contains a number of minor enhancements and bug fixes over the previous 1.1.3 release. The 2.0.0-beta1 build is a preview of our next major release and includes significant new functionality, including frameworks for persisting Java objects in an LDAP directory and for more easily creating applications which accept communication from LDAP clients. The 1.1.4 version is available for immediate download on the UnboundID website, and both the 1.1.4 and 2.0.0-beta1 builds are available for download from the SourceForge project page. The 1.1.4 release is fully supported for production use and has a stable API that will not change in incompatible ways in the future. Although we also believe that the 2.0.0-beta1 build is also production ready, we do reserve the right to change any of the new APIs prior to the official release if there is a compelling reason to do so.

Some of the most notable changes between the 1.1.3 and 1.1.4 releases include:

• I have fixed a bug that could cause problems when trying to use SSL or StartTLS in conjunction with synchronous communication mode. This problem primarily occurred in deployments in which the client and server were not on the same network and there could be a significant delay between phases of the negotiation.

• A new search-and-mod-rate command line tool has been added that can be used to test LDAP server performance under a combined load of search and modify operations. The searches will be performed in much the same way as with the searchrate tool, but each entry returned will also be modified.

• The ldapsearch tool has been updated to provide an option to repeat the search multiple times at regular intervals. This can be useful, for example, if you want to periodically retrieve monitor information from the server.

• The traditional and thread-local connection pool implementations have been updated to provide an option to avoid closing and re-establishing a large number of connections in a short period of time in the event that a maximum connection time limit has been configured. It is now possible to specify the minimum length of time that should pass between closures of expired connections.

• If a problem is encountered while trying to decode a response read from the directory server, the exception that is thrown now includes better information about the problem that actually occurred to make it easier to diagnose the problem.

• The searchrate, modrate, and authrate tools have been updated to better handle the case in which the target directory server becomes unavailable during processing. The tools are now better able to re-establish connections to that server when it becomes available again.

The 2.0.0-beta1 build includes everything in the 1.1.4 release, as well as additional new functionality. In previous blog posts, I have discussed some of the features added to the LDAP SDK persistence framework, and that functionality has been further improved in this new version. Some of those changes include better support for operational attributes, the ability to use lazy initialization for a specified set of attributes, and adding support for simple bind operations. It also includes a new listener API, which makes it possible to easily create applications capable of accepting communication from LDAP clients. A new ldap-debugger example tool makes use of the listener API and can serve as a simple proxy which decodes all LDAP communication that passes through it.

We are very interested in getting feedback on the new APIs included in the upcoming 2.0.0 release because we are committed to maintaining compatibility once they have been officially released. If you are interested in either the persistence or the listener APIs, please at least look over the javadoc and let us know what you think.