Today is the second anniversary of the OpenDS project: an open source LDAP directory service written in Java.

Taking a few minutes to look back at the year that just passed, I’m proud of what we’ve done.

First we’ve released OpenDS 1.0 for the community. We now have a complete and fully featured LDAP directory server, easy to use, embeddable, extensible, reliable, fast… And we’re about to release the Sun supported version : Sun OpenDS Standard Edition 1.0. I’m sure you’ll hear more about it in the coming days.

We’ve grown our community of users and developers despite going through internal re-organization. We have almost doubled the number of committers in a year, receiving contributions in tests, functionalities, code and designs. The number of registered users has reached the 200 mark.

We’ve done well but there is still a lot to do for the coming years. We need to continue to deliver the functionalities our users and customers want. We need to continue to grow OpenDS ecosystem and community.

So come and have a part of the journey with us. There are many ways to interact with the OpenDS community, beside playing and running the code:

• Sign-up for a Java.net account and request a role on OpenDS
• Subscribe to the OpenDS users or dev Mailing lists
• Browse or Search the OpenDS mailing lists archive with MarkMail
• Read and write about OpenDS on the OpenDS documentation wiki
• Call in our monthly public meetings
• Chat about OpenDS on the #opends IRC channel
• Tweet about OpenDS
• Wear OpenDS from the OpenDS CafePress store
• Dive into the OpenDS stats with OpenDS @ ohloh
• Tag the OpenDS news @ SWiK
• Decorate your profile on Facebook with the OpenDS FaceBook Group
• Network with OpenDS users and developers from the OpenDS LinkedIn Group
• Network with more OpenDS users and developers from the OpenDS Plaxo Group

Technorati Tags: java, ldap, opends, opensource

On July 10th, OpenDS 1.0.0 the open source LDAP directory service in Java was released. In the release notes, the list of platforms on which OpenDS has been qualified is quite long but does not mention Mac OS X.

Many OpenDS developers have a MacBook (Pro) and use it for development, unit tests and first integration tests.

So OpenDS 1.0.0 works really well on Mac OS X with either Java 5 and Java 6.

OpenDS is now listed on Apple Mac OS X Downloads site, in the Unix and Open Source category.

Marla just announced the availability of MarkMail services for Java.net, provided free by MarkLogic.

As a result, you can now search, analyze, browse all of the Java.net mailing lists and more specifically the OpenDS ones:

• Users
• Dev
• Precommit-Notification
• QA

The service fills a need that has been expressed several times on … the mailing lists. If you want to give it a try for other Java.net projects :

http://markmail.org/search/?q=list%3Anet.java.dev.<ProjectName&gt;

Technorati Tags: java, opends, opensource, mailinglist, search

If you’re planing on using LDAP Naming Services with Solaris or OpenSolaris, we’ve just published a detailed article on how to setup OpenDS, the open source LDAP directory service written in Java, for it.

In a near future, we will make it even easier as we’re planning on having OpenDS 1.0 available in the OpenSolaris package repository.

Technorati Tags: directory-server, ldap, naming, opends, opensolaris, opensource

The OpenDS development team is very please to announce the release of OpenDS 1.0.0, the first stable release of the OpenDS project.

OpenDS 1.0.0 delivers a fully compliant LDAPv3 server (*) that passes all of the compliance, interoperability and security tests suites. Furthermore, OpenDS 1.0.0 implements most the standard and experimental LDAP extensions defined in the IETF as RFCs or Internet-Drafts, ensuring maximum interoperability with LDAP client applications.

With a limited footprint allowing the server to be embedded in other Java applications, OpenDS has a very rich set of APIs making it easy to extend and increase usage scope.

OpenDS also supports a multi-master replication model that guarantees the high availability of the data for all operations, searches or updates. While theorically unlimited with regards to the number of masters, the OpenDS 1.0.0 server has been stressed under heavy and durable load with 4 Masters.

OpenDS 1.0.0 also includes :

– A 6 steps graphical installation tool that allows to have a server configured, up and running in less than 3 minutes.

– A graphical status panel

– A rich command line tool to perform all online administrative tasks both interactively or scripted.

– Advance security and password policies

– Advance backup and restore capabilities.

– A DSML gateway servlet.

– A complete user documentation set.

Note that the defaults settings for the OpenDS server are targeted for the initial evaluator or developer, running on a machine with a limited amount of resources. So it is important to do initial tuning of the Java VM and the OpenDS server to scale.

The first recommendation is to use the latest version of the Java VM (as of today Java 6 update 6 aka 1.6.0_06).

Some recommendations for the Java VM settings have been published on the OpenDS Documentation Wiki. More specifically, in order to have constant performance, tuning the Garbage Collector is needed. We recommend the CMS GC or ParallelGC.

Finally, OpenDS does provide better performances when the database files are cached into memory. The initial size for the DB cache is 10% of the heap size and is definitely under sized. A good rule of thumb is to allocated a DB cache size about half of the heap size if the later is below or equal to 2 GB, and for heap size greater than 2 GB to allocate a DB cache size equal to the heap size minus 1GB.

While we are really happy with the first stable release of the OpenDS LDAP directory server, our roadmap includes many other features and some ambitious ones:

– Native packages for OpenSolaris and Linux.

– Transactions for LDAP

– Assured Replication which is a replication model where a changed is assured to be received on at least 2 masters before it get acknowledge to the client application.

– Access to the log of changes over LDAP in order to provide external synchronization services.

– Basic management GUI for the most common tasks.

– Confidentiality and Encryption negotiation through SASL

– Improved performances

…

For the more information about OpenDS 1.0.0 please check the release notes.

Support for OpenDS 1.0.0 will be soon available from Sun Microsystems.

(*) with the exception of a partial support of RFC 4518 – International String Preparation

Technorati Tags: directory-server, java, ldap, opends, opensource, Sun

The Sun Directory Service Control Center is a web application that allows administrators to configure and administer all of their Sun Directory 6.x servers and Directory Proxy 6.x servers from a single place.

The Console is supported to run on Tomcat 5.5 and Sun Java System Application Server 8.2. In a previous blog post, I demonstrated how to deploy DSCC in GlassFishv2.

Thanks to Eric Le Ponner, architect of DSEE and lead developer for the Administration part, we can now deploy DSCC in WebLogic 10 Application Server.

This will be fully supported with Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition 7, but here’s the workaround to get it to work with Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition 6.3.

First deploy DSCC war file on WebLogic.

Then just add the following weblogic.xml file in the WEB-INF directory, next to the web.xml file for the DSCC web application:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<weblogic-web-app

xmlns="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/90&quot;

xmlns:j2ee="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee&quot;

xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance&quot;

xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/90 http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/90/weblogic-web-app.xsd"&gt;

<container-descriptor>

<filter-dispatched-requests-enabled>false</filter-dispatched-requests-enabled>

</container-descriptor>

</weblogic-web-app>

There you are.

For those who like the gory details, DSCC is a servlet 2.3 web application and implements a servlet filter to manage security. WebLogic 10 Application Server supports by default the servlet 2.4 specifications and process differently filtered requests. The trick is then to instruct WebLogic to do the filtering as for the servlet 2.3 specifications.

Technorati Tags: directory-server, java-enterprise-system, ldap, Sun

The two presentations that I gave at Jazoon 08 last week are online available on OpenDS Wiki.

You can also get the “OpenDS Inside: an LDAP server embedded in your application” slides from the session page at Jazoon. If you attended the presentation, you can give it a rating (out of 5 stars) at that page.

You can also see SuperPat’s photos from the Jazoon 08 Flickr set. (Thanks Pat for almost choosing me as an exclusive model ;-))

Photo by Pat Patterson

Technorati Tags: conference, directory-server, java, jazoon2008, ldap, opends