We have just released the latest version of the UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java, version 2.1.0. You can get it from either the UnboundID website, or from the SourceForge project page.

This is a pretty significant update that has a number of changes in several areas. You can see the release notes for a fairly comprehensive overview of the changes that have been made in this version, but the major focus of the 2.1.0 release was in improving testability, and there are two new features that can significantly help with that:

• The LDAP SDK now comes with the ability to create one or more very lightweight yet surprisingly feature-rich LDAP server instances that you can use for testing the directory-enabled applications that you are developing. Although it’s not suitable for production use, it does support quite a few controls and extended operations, SASL authentication, an LDAP-accessible changelog and other features that your application might rely on. It’s also got a lot of nice testing-friendly features like the ability to make assertions about the state of data in the server, the ability to create and restore point-in-time snapshots so that you can revert the server to a known state, and the ability to have multiple listeners that you can control independently for things like testing failover between servers.

• It also provides a new LDAPTestUtils class that has lots of helpful methods for use in writing test cases for directory-enabled applications. This includes methods for generating simple entries of various types (e.g., users, groups, organizations, organizationalUnits, etc.), for verifying the contents of a directory server over LDAP, and for verifying results received from processing operations.

These new features have already made it significantly easier for my own testing in developing the LDAP SDK itself, when writing LDAP-based tools, and even in the development of the UnboundID server products like the Directory Server, Directory Proxy Server, and Synchronization Server. Hopefully, it will make it easier for you to test your own applications as well. I’ll be writing additional posts in the near future that go into more detail about how you can use these new features to make it easier to test your directory-enabled applications.