ApacheDS™ is an extensible and embeddable directory server entirely written in Java, which has been certified LDAPv3 compatible by the Open Group. Besides LDAP it supports Kerberos 5 and the Change Password Protocol. It has been designed to introduce triggers, stored procedures, queues and views to the world of LDAP which has lacked these rich constructs. It has several features that make it unique among LDAP servers. Some of these featurea are as follows:

Designed as an LDAP and X.500 platform; plugable components and subsystems make ApacheDS extremely modular and ideal for experiments with various aspects of the LDAP protocol.

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 directories.

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 as long as it conforms to interfaces.

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 ou=system. 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.

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.

LDAP Stored Procedures and Triggers are scheduled for the next major version of ApacheDS.

LDAPv3 compatible certified by the OpenGroup