UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java 2.2.0 has just been released and is available for download from the UnboundID website or the SourceForge project page, and is also available in the Maven central repository.

The release notes provide a full overview of the changes in this release over the previous 2.1.0 version. There are several bug fixes, but some of the most notable new features include:

• A new Minimal Edition has been introduced. The Minimal Edition is available under the same licenses as the Standard Edition and provides support for all LDAP operations, but a number of capabilities have been removed (e.g., support for SASL authentication, a number of controls and extended operations, the persistence framework, the listener framework and in-memory directory server, JNDI and Netscape SDK migration support, etc.). The primary goal of the Minimal Edition is to provide a version of the LDAP SDK with a small jar file size which is desirable for resource-constrained environments like Android applications or other embedded use. The Minimal Edition is available as a separate download, from either the UnboundID website or SourceForge project.

• Connection pooling support has been updated to provide the ability to automatically retry operations if the first attempt fails in a way that indicates the connection may no longer be valid. In such cases, a new connection will be established (potentially to a different server, based on the ServerSet in use for the pool) and the operation will be re-attempted on that connection. This can help isolate applications from failures if one of the target directory servers is shut down, crashes, hangs, or begins behaving erratically.

• The in-memory directory server has been updated to add support for maintaining referential integrity (e.g., so that if an entry is deleted then that user can be automatically removed from any static groups in which the user was a member), to support LDAP transactions as described in RFC 5805, and to add support for inserting an arbitrary delay before processing operations (which can be useful in simulating environments with slower response times or higher network latencies). There have also been a couple of fixes for bugs that could cause the in-memory directory server to behave incorrectly.

• The LDAP SDK persistence framework has been updated to provide better support for searches. Previously, it was difficult to search for entries using anything but equality searches. The generate-source-from-schema tool has been updated so that it will now generate additional methods that can make it easier to perform other kinds of searches, including presence, substring (starts with, ends with, and contains), greater-or-equal, less-or-equal, and approximately-equal-to.

• New methods have been added which make it significantly easier to interact with response controls. Each response control class now has one or more static get methods that can be used to extract and decode a response control of that type from a given response object.

• Support for GSSAPI authentication has been significantly improved to add support for a number of new options, including the ability to indicate whether to use (or even require) a ticket cache, to specify an alternate location for the ticket cache file, and to request that the TGT be renewed. Changes have also been introduced to make it easier to access GSSAPI debugging information.

• A new option has been added that makes it possible to automatically send an abandon request to the directory server if a client-side timeout is encountered while waiting for a response to an operation. Previously, the LDAP SDK would throw an exception but did not have any option to attempt to abandon the operation in the directory server.

• The LDAP SDK can now use schema information (if available) in the process of normalizing and comparing DNs and RDNs. This can provide more accurate matching for DNs that use attributes in which something other than case-inexact string matching should be used.

• The LDIF reader has been updated to provide the ability to read data from multiple files. This can be useful for cases in which the complete set of data you want to process is broken up into multiple files (e.g., representing different portions of the DIT).