Welcome to JOD Snapshot

JOD Snapshot, the Java Object Directory Snapshot, is a Java library that enables to persist Java Objects onto an LDAP directory

Tools like Hibernate helped us a lot in simplifying the persistence of Java objects onto relational databases. But relational databases is not the only possible data repositories. Most organizations use to store informations about employees and offices in LDAP directories that application servers use as users repositories for authentication and authorization purposes.

So it happens that our applications need to access these informations. For example we need to know who is the boss of the user currently logged in. To answer questions like this in Java we can use JNDI API to query the directory, but JNDI suffers the same problems of JDBC that Hibernate solved: you need to write a lot of procedural code that takes a lot of time and disturbs our Object Oriented way of thinking.

JOD Snapshot helps us because we are able to map Java objects onto LDAP directories entries in the same way Hibernate maps objects onto relational databases. Then we can retrieve our objects directly and follow the associations between them in a full object-oriented fashion.

To start playing download the JOD Snapshot package then read the Quick Start Guide you can find under the Documentation tab.