How can I work with Novell eDirectory services in J2SE? Will JNDI work with eDirectory? What are some resources I can use to learn about whatever library or libraries you suggest?
I just want to play around with retrieving information via LDAP for right now, and if I get things working the way I want, I will probably need to be able to modify objects later on.
Thanks!
Any LDAP interface you want to use should work fine against eDirectory.
Be aware that the configuration of the LDAP server may not allow clear text passwords, thus a bind to port 636 via SSL (Where you have the certificate imported into the keystore already) or via TLS (retrieve the tree CA's public key on the fly).
If you have administrative access to the eDirectory server, you can easily change that, but still best to confirm that you can get it to work over SSL/TLS (aka LDAPS).
If you really need it, you can ask the admins for a server with only a replica of some test partition (and thus no real user data in its view) and test via cleartext against that.
It is very easy in eDirectory to add a new replica of a partition, carve off or merge a partition, and all can be done live.
It is similarly very easy to host replicas of many partitions on one server. (The official limit is, no limit on the number or partitions in a tree, or replicas on a server, but it used to be 256 in older versions (before 8.x) )
If you are allowed access to the eDirectory server, you want to to ask for access to Dstrace (several versions of this, see Many Faces of Dstrace). There is a web interface (server:8008 on Netware, 8010 on Windows, 8028 on Unix/Linux usually) or other interfaces. If you enable the LDAP trace option (and turn off all the others) you can fairly completely debug what is going on at the server side. See the errors, the communication, or lack thereof and so on.
try; http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/Jldap and http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/Novell_LDAP_Extended_Library
Used it successfully with OpenLDAP and should suffice for eDirectory as well.