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    <author email="akarasulu@apache.org">Alex Karasulu</author>
    <title>ApacheDS - Features</title>    
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    <section name="Server's Features">
      <p> 
        The Apache Directory Server is an embeddable LDAP server implemented in
        pure Java.  It has several features that make it unique amoung LDAP 
        servers.  These features are described below:
      </p>
      
      <ul>
        <li>
          Designed as an LDAP and X.500 experimentation platform.  Plugable
          components and subsystems make ApacheDS extremely modular and ideal 
          for experiments with various aspects of the LDAP protocol. 
        </li>
        
        <li>
          The server's frontend is completely separable from its backend and
          vice-versa making it very flexible for implementing virtual
          directories, proxy servers and gateways to X.500.
        </li>
        
        <li>
          Several backends can be implemented and plugged into the server's
          partition nexus.  The server supports a BTree based partition out of
          the box but any backing store can be used to implement a partition so
          long as it conforms to interfaces.
        </li>
        
        <li>
          The server exposes aspects of administration via a special system
          backend.  LDAP can be used to manage these concerns through the
          system naming context at <code>ou=system</code>.
        </li>
        
        <li>
          Java based triggers and stored procedures are being implemented.
        </li>
        
        <li>
          Both the backend subsystem and the frontend are separable and
          independently embeddable.
        </li>
        
        <li>
          The server contains a server side JNDI LDAP provider as the facade
          for the entire backend subsystem.  JNDI operations are directly
          translated by this provider into operations against the nexus and the
          target partitions storing server entries.
        </li>
        
        <li>
          The server will use JNDI as the data access API for stored procedures.
          This will make stored procedures functional within and outside of the
          server without requiring recompilation.
        </li>
        
        <li>
          The server's networking code, MINA, Multipurpose Infrastructure for
          Network Applications was designed for pluggable protocol providers,
          of all sorts and not just LDAP.  MINA gives ApacheDS the ability to 
          handle large amounts of concurrency.  
        </li>
        
        <li>
          The server uses the Snickers tools and APIs for ASN.1 BER encoding and
          decoding.  These tools are designed for a very small encoding and
          decoding footprint as well as for use in non-blocking servers.  The
          chunking nature of the BER codec makes the server very efficient while
          handling encoding and decoding making it more resistant to DoS
          attacks.  This layer is also pluggable with a new experimental Twix
          provider which is much more efficient.  Of course there is the
          unsupported Snacc4J provider which is no longer maintained.
        </li>
      </ul>
      </section>
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