Features

MINA Powered Apache Directory Hatches

By Dilip Thomas

The Apache Directory project graduated incubation under the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) according to the ASF Board Summary for February 23, 2005. The primary vision behind the project is to build an enterprise directory server platform (Apache Directory Server) and its components where other Internet services snap in to store their data within the directory so they may be managed using LDAP. Those services include LDAP itself, DNS, DHCP, SLP, UDDI, NTP, and most importantly Kerberos, which can integrate with the services to provide full-featured network authentication service. These services will use a common networking layer and each can be toggled on and off according to the needs of the environment. apseda, mina, or sedang are various frameworks used for the common network layer. These services share the common network layer and back their data within the Apache Directory Server's backing stores without any network latency or going through the LDAP line protocol.

Other aspects to the project's vision include becoming the JNDI goto project and also becoming the one stop shop for all directory and naming concerns here at the ASF. These concerns may be outside of the scope of JNDI or may not even fall under Java.

Features of Apache Directory Server:

Designed as an LDAP and X.500 experimentation platform
The server exposes all aspects of administration via a special system backend
Both the backend subsystem and the frontend are separable and independently embeddable
Provides a server side JNDI LDAP provider which directly interacts with the backend storage
Powered by MINA, a powerful framework for building Internet protocol servers

Features expected to be implemented in forthcoming versions:

Remote management via JMX
Java-based triggers and stored procedures

The Apache Directory team is on the lookout for developers and users to work with the server and give feedback. Mailing list information is available here.


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