ANNOUNCE ocamldap-2.0.3

ANNOUNCE ocamldap-2.0.3

[Eric Stokes]

Hello All,

This is announcing the immediate release of ocamldap v2.0.3. Because of 
my busy schedule I did not announce the release of 2.0, however this 
release seems to be "stable", and I have more time, so I will announce 
it now.

ocamldap 2.0 features/changes
The Good
-- Another C binding bites the dust! Ocaml implementation of the wire 
protocol, implements the lber subset of ber (useful in itself for 
anyone working on ASN.1 stuff), no a C binding! I am very excited about 
this, it was fun code to write, and I am pleased with the performance 
given the time we spent. Some of you may recall that we promised to do 
this about 6 months ago, and lo, we have delivered.
-- The most exciting consequence of the native implementation of the 
protocol is that we now are not only a client library. We also provide 
a library for constructing LDAP SERVERS! We are very excited about 
this, and we already have a daemon based on this in the late stages of 
development. 
-- Optional SSL and TLS support via Samuel Mimram's ocaml-ssl binding 
(requires openssl)

The Bad
-- The native implementation is not as fast as the C implementation. It 
IS within an order of magnitude on all tested platforms, and we are 
confident that we can do better. Coming close to the C implementation 
may be possible.

The Ugly
-- Unfortunately, we were forced for the sake of the future to make 
some API changes. So Ocamldap 2.x is NOT backward compatible with 1.x. 
The changes are not extensive however. The exception LDAP_Failure has 
been augmented to include all the error information sent back by the 
server. This is especially important for processing referrals, for 
which there was no support in 1.x. The module names have been 
reorganized and standardized, hopefully they will now be less 
confusing. The init function now takes a list of servers instead of 
just one, and each server is an ldap url instead of a host/port. The 
use of this is that init will try each server in the list, and if 
host-names with more than one IP are included it will try each IP 
(round robin DNS). This integrates with the transparent reconnection 
capabilities to allow the user to configure a pool of ldap servers to 
talk to, and if any ONE is working then the library will continue to 
work.

License
Since all the code has been rewritten it is now released under the LGPL 
instead of the BSD license

Obtaining Ocamldap
best obtained via godi
also available from http://ocamldap.sourceforge.net/

Eric Stokes
Analyst Programmer
California State University Northridge