With OpenDJ 2.6.0, we’ve introduced a new way to access your directory data, using HTTP, REST and JSon. The REST to LDAP service, available either embedded in the OpenDJ server or as a standalone web application, is designed to facilitate the work of application developers. And to demonstrate the interest and the ease of use of that service, we’ve built a sample application for Android : the OpenDJ Contact Manager

The OpenDJ Contact Manager is an open source Android application that was built by Violette, one of the ForgeRock engineer working in the OpenDJ team. You can get the source code from the SVN repository : https://svn.forgerock.org/commons/mobile/contact-manager/trunk. Mark wrote some quite complete documentation for the project, with details on how to get and build the application. He published it at http://commons.forgerock.org/mobile/contact-manager/.

The whole application is just about 4000 lines of code, and most of it is dealing with the display itself. But you can find code that deals with asynchronous calls to the OpenDJ rest interface, with paging through results, and parsing the resulting JSON stream to populate the Contacts, including photos. Et voila :

The application is just a sample but it clearly is usable in its current form and will allow once a contact was retrieved from the OpenDJ directory, to add it to the Contacts standard application, call the person, locate its address on maps, send the person an email, navigate through the management chain…

In future versions, we are planning to add support for OAuth 2.0, removing the need to store credentials in the application settings.

As it’s open source, feel free to play with it, hack and contribute back your changes.