Spring LDAP vs UnboundId LDAP

Question

We are building a new library which will need to do read/writes to our main identity management LDAP system.

We are considering using either Spring LDAP (http://projects.spring.io/spring-ldap/), UnboundId LDAP (https://www.ldap.com/unboundid-ldap-sdk-for-java), or http://www.ldaptive.org (which can use UnboundId LDAP).

Since we use Spring libraries/frameworks in our projects using Spring LDAP might be easier.

Anyone have good experience with the newer version of Spring LDAP or UnboundId LDAP? Any pros/cons between the two?

It looks like Spring LDAP development has stalled (no commits for some time, limited releases). Anyone know if that Spring LDAP development is still active?

Thanks for the help.

Bruce

Answer 1

I was in the same boat a little while ago. Was switching over to using Spring framework and was debating on whether to just use the Spring LDAP since it was easy to use or to use UnboundID

I'm not really an expert on Spring but I tried it and while it was pretty easy to use the thing that concerned me was that its built on top of the JNDI API (which is horrendous). Here's a post that lists some other SDK choices in case you want to try something else

I ended up deciding on UnboundID. I've tried it for a while and its worked great so far. The API is well done and its being very actively developed (which is important to me). The devs are also very active on the forum which is a plus. Their Persistence API is neat too

I'm not really familiar with ldaptive but it seems like just an abstraction layer. It's a good idea if you envision changing the ldap implementation in future

Both Spring and UnboundID APIs are pretty straightforward tho so you could even write your own thin wrapper around them and shouldn't be hard to switch out in future. You will probably end up doing utility classes anyway