The 2.3.1 release of the UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java primarily includes a number of bug fixes and minor functionality enhancements, many of which are in direct response to requests from users. You can get the latest release online at the UnboundID website or the SourceForge project page, and it’s also available in the Maven Central Repository.

As usual, the release notes provide a complete overview of changes made in this release, but some of the most significant updates include:

• The 2.3.0 release added the ability for the LDAP SDK to respect client-side timeouts for operations invoked via the asynchronous API. Unfortunately, for applications which had a very high rate of asynchronous operations, a bug in this implementation could cause excessive memory pressure (potentially including out of memory errors). That bug has been corrected.
• Also in the 2.3.0 release, a change was made to prevent simultaneous use of the socket factory associated with the client connection. This was done in response to the discovery that some socket factories in the IBM JVM (at the SSL socket factory, if not others) may fail if an attempt was made to use them concurrently by multiple threads. Unfortunately, while this change made the LDAP SDK safer to use on such platforms, it also introduced a problem for other JVMs that could cause long delays in the ability to establish a connection following an attempt to connect to a server that is either unresponsive or slow to respond. In an attempt to strike a balance between these problems, concurrent use will be allowed on JVMs known to be threadsafe (including those provided by Sun, Oracle, and Apple), while still defaulting to single-threaded use on other JVMs. In addition, it is now possible to configure whether this should be allowed on a per-connection basis using a new setting in the LDAPConnectionOptions class.
• A number of new SSL trust managers have been added, including one which looks only at the validity dates of the presented certificate, another that looks at the hostname of the certificate (either in the CN subject attribute or a subjectAltName extension), and an aggregate trust manager that can be used to decide whether to trust a certificate based on the combined results of a set of trust managers. Also, the prompt trust manager has been updated to display additional information about the certificate to allow the user to make more informed decisions about whether to trust the certificate.
• Support for the SASL EXTERNAL bind request has been updated to make it possible to either include or exclude the SASL credentials element. This makes it possible to work with directory servers which require SASL credentials as well as those which do not expect them for EXTERNAL requests.
• We have added a new server set implementation which will attempt to simultaneously connect to multiple servers, and will return the first connection it was able to establish. While this may increase the load across all servers at the time of the connection attempt, it helps ensure the lowest possible delay when trying to establish a connection to one of a set of servers.
• The LDIF reader has been updated to provide better control over how to handle lines with unexpected trailing spaces, and also to make it possible to handle reading data from file with relative paths rather.
• The searchrate, modrate, and search-and-modrate tools have been updated to make it possible to periodically close and re-establish connections to the server after a specified number of operations.
• Fixed a corner case bug resulting from an application which attempted to use multiple resource files with the same paths. For example, if an application tried to use a properties file named “ldap.properties” or “util.properties”, there may be a conflict between the version of that file used by the application and the one provided by the UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java. The names of the properties files used by the LDAP SDK have been renamed to avoid the possibility of conflicting with those which may have been used by other applications.