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Java API to query LDAP

I am looking to query LDAP server to retrieve all the user entries from it. I have come across some libraries
OpenLDAP
LDAP SDK
Mozilla Directory
Apache Directory API
My requirements would be to query all users in an LDAP implementation like AD Server, ease of programming and good community around the library. I don't find a clear winner here. Can someone tell me the widely used and robust API?

The best API to use with Java is the UnboundID LDAP SDK. It's clear, complete, fully implements the LDAP standard specification, easy-to-use and understand, fully documented, thread-safe where it should be, and the standard edition is free. No other API even comes close.
see also
LDAP Examples using the UnboundID LDAP SDK

Had to dive into Java LDAP SDK market, as some old LDAP JAVA programs with SDK bugs needed to be fixed and I had lost up-to-date overview of supported Java LDAP APIs for a while. A little research has brought me to several aged overviews and this rather old thread. I thought, I'd just share my more-up-to-date SDK findings here.
As of today, this is what the Java LDAP SDK market seems to offer:
jLDAP (Novell Java LDAP SDK),
OpenLDAP Java SDK (sibling fork of Novell LDAP SDK),
Netscape/Sun Java LDAP SDK,
OpenDS LDAP SDK: All 4 repositories seem practically dead/unmaintained for several years (some of them for a decade now) now. No backing companies or active communities in sight.
Oracle LDAP SDK: Basically the former Netscape/Sun Java SDK with paid Oracle support, but otherwise not maintained either. Does not even exist in the open source world.
OpenDJ Java LDAP SDK: The backing company has moved away from the open source market, no longer maintain this SDK. The most recent SDK version 3.0.0 is already several years old and never left beta stage, the latest official release version is even older: 2.6.11. The commercial version of the SDK is said to be practically abandonned either.
ldaptive.org: some university project. A former JNDI wrapper, but now claims to have an own LDAP SDK protocol implementation. There seem to be no community or users outside of the university perimeter. Not dead, but currently unclear, what quality state to expect here. If you'd ask me, this project would have done a lot better, to spend their time backing the Apache LDAP SDK project, as no one actually needs yet another look-mom-I-also-made-an LDAP-Client-SDK in an a saturated market full of other mostly mediocre JAVA LDAP SDKs.
Apache LDAP SDK: Compared to other Apache projects, the LDAP SDK shows really slow pace. Somehow Apache LDAP seems to miss a real company backing things, it's only talented hobby enthusiasts pusing things forward. You probably do not want to start any new projects with SDK V1.0, as they state that V2.0 breaks interface code. but you probably also do not want to use SDK V2.0 yet, as it's still beta and no one knows for how much longer it will stay beta (V1 stayed beta for 6 years...). The SDK is far from being dead, it's just showing really really slow progress.
Java JNDI: Built into Java since ages and has not changed since release. Still is really ugly for coding, documentation is a mess, every task beyond basic search is an implementation nightmare, basically every project fails to properly implement it, several things are broken by design. There seem to have been a few concept ideas of a JNDI-LDAP-successor for a future JDK, but nothing has ever followed so far.
Unbound SDK: Mature, best maintained SDK, has huge amount of features, though the backing company is still nurtured from venture capital, burning money. So far it does not look like they stand on their own feet any time soon. So the long term aspect of SDK backing support is unclear. A former party pooper for the SDK in commercial projects once was its GPL license. The open source version now seems to have a LGPL license as well (that may or may not fit a project).
Spring: seems like a stable LDAP SDK, plus has the large Spring community. But less feature-rich and no bleeding edge stuff. Personally no experience yet though with this SDK.
So right now, Java LDAP seem to have a reasonable choice of four: JNDI, Unbound, Spring, Apache, each with their pros and cons. And you probably will hate JNDI a lot, as soon as you start using it.
A good advice might be, to not rush into migration projects of old SDKs and to invest into the extra effort of implementing wrapper code, to be at all able to easily switch the SDK later when needed.

Check the Apache Directory Client API it is opensource and has an active community (full disclosure: I work on Apache Directory project) and most importantly Apache Directory Client supports all basic LDAP controls including password policy and syncrepl by default unlike some commercial versions which support these in a paid version only.
You can easily add new/custom controls and extended operations if needed and it is very easy to start an in-memory Directory Server with the help of the annotation driven test framework
Take a look at this example to see how you can leverage the API and test framework for unit testing.
And otoh, if you ever need a Kerberos v5 server in your unit test, it is just an annotation away.

We use the the UnboundID LDAP SDK. It is very good and there are many examples and good support.
Poor support and maintenance for the JLDAP and Mozilla Directory APIs is why we QUIT using them.
Like the https://wiki.mozilla.org/LDAP_Java_SDK does not exist.
The JLDP sdk has not been updated in YEARS. (2009 as I recall).

There is also open source lib from Imperva https://github.com/imperva/domain-directory-controller
There You can find a pretty good examples of queries.

I'm using https://www.ldaptive.org/ in production, so far I'm pleased it's like 'ORM'

Please discuss what are and why use portlets

Why would I want to use java portlets above tomcat and gwt?
Would portlets make it less- or un- necessary for me to use jsp and jsf?
Has Jboss been part of the portlet evolution culture? Does Jboss satisfy the portlet jsrs?
What portlet implementation/brand would run on gae java and gae python?
Are portlet specs due to peer pressure from php cms culture?
What are the equivalent of portlet and portlet jsr in .net?

Portlets were a well-meaning but mis-guided attempt at a reusable widget API for web applications. Think of the personalised google home page, with the portlets like weather, news, mail, etc.
Unfortunately, they made a bit of a mess of it. The Portlet API is a bit of a pig, a real barrel of not-fun, and there are very few implementations of it. The only one I've ever used is JBoss Portal, but it's a bit of a brute, and rather buggy. Liferay may also be a portlet server, but the home page is heavy on fluff and light on information, so I can't tell.
Spring provides an MVC framework for the portlet API which tries to reduce the pain, but frankly I wish they hadn't bothered, it just clutters up the documentation.
Essentially, the whole shebang looks like a solution in search of a problem.

If you happen to have a framework that you need to use, and it supports portlets, you may find then that portlets are going to be useful, since the application is built with the idea, but, as others have mentioned, if you are starting on a project, there are many other technologies that will do what you want with less effort, in a more stable environment.
For example, when I worked at the University of South Florida, the learning management system was (and is) Blackboard, and they now support portlets: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/Blackboard+Portlet. So, if the application provides an API, and expects people to use portlets, then it may make sense to look at them.
UPDATE:
After looking at the question there were a couple of things I missed.
Portlets were an attempt, it seems, to try to do as Google did on their homepage, where you could have multiple unrelated blocks of information on the webpage, so you could track your stack portfolio and your favorite hockey team, for example. I don't think it was influenced by PHP CMS as it was just an idea that was ready to come about, and if you need the server code to help pull the information, and to tie it into an application, this was one approach.
The closest thing in ASP.NET that I can think of to portlets are controls. I could have a stock portfolio control and when I include it on my page, you can set the options and it will show you your stocks and hockey team scores.
Not everyone uses JSF, for example, so controls would need to be written by hand as JSPs and servlets, with javascript.

Why would I want to use java portlets above tomcat and gwt?
These technologies are not directly comparable. Coming from regular web page development, Portlets seem like a very restrictive technology. But then the value of Portal servers is largely the control they give to administrators and users - the fact that this makes your life more difficult is irrelevant.
Would portlets make it less- or un- necessary for me to use jsp and jsf?
You can write directly to the output, just like you would in a Servlet. You probably still want a view technology (that will have to support portlets).

What is the difference between jetspeed 2 and pluto?

I'm looking into implementing one of our internal applications as a portal using portlets, as it has many functionalities and not all of them are required by all users.
I've looking at the Apache protals site and I saw that there are two projects - Jetspeed 2 and Pluto.
Although Jetspeed is described as portal and Pluto as a portlet container, it also provides a portal of its own. What is the real difference between them and their functionalities? Can you recommend which should I start "playing" with?

Jetspeed 2 uses Pluto as its portlet container, but it is geared towards being a fully functional enterprise application, including its own suite of portlets, SSO, customizable security, themes etc....
If you are looking to get started with portals/portlets, the Jetspeed 2 project is moving along rapidly, and I would suggest joining the mailing lists, as they can be incredibly helpful. Also, download and build the portal from source using the tutorial on the apache portals site and you should be up and running with a custom portal in no time.

I have worked extensively with Jetspeed 1. I have been a bit out of the loop since J2 and JSR 186, but here is my best guess. It is only a guess, but I'm confident enough to post it here.
(Assumption: a portal uses a portlet container, and a portlet container cannot really run by itself.)
Jetspeed 2 aims to be a full enterprise portal which uses Pluto as the portlet container. Pluto has its own simple portal, as it does not want a dependency on any given portal project. I believe the Pluto portal is not intended as enterprise-level.
The statement above is supported by this part of the Pluto FAQ (from here):
Is Pluto an Enterprise Portal?
No, the Pluto project aims to provide a Java Specification compliant
Portlet Container. In order to support
the container, the Pluto project
provides a simple portal, however,
this does not provides optional
services such as single sign on. If
you are looking for an Open Source
enterprise Portal implementation,
there are several available. Apache
Jetspeed is an enterprise portal
hosted by the Apache Software
Foundation. Sakai and uPortal are both
educational portals which utilize
Pluto as their container. There are
many other open source portals.

Pluto is really not intended to be use as Enterprise Portal. It's useful for development(it's tiny&fast) and you can embed it if you want to develop you own Portal server. But that's a lot of work.
If you want to just "dive in" look at JetSpeed. Or I can recommend you to have a look at Liferay Portal. It's open source as well and it's going with a lot of plugins(portlets) right out-of-the-box. So it gives you a quick impression what is possible to do with it.

Non-Windows RAD Web development

I have spent most of my web-development career in the Microsoft camp, but for different reasons I am trying to look at options.
Some years back I did a bit of Java/Struts development in eclipse, which was nice for its time but my memories of it are not close to what Visual Studio delivers today.
Some of the strengths of the MS stack as I see it are:
Ease of use. Free tools (express
editions), easy to set up, easy to deploy, loads of components and
support, even for cutting edge
features like ajax and jQuery.
Intellisense, so that the API
reference is there as you need it.
Size of the community. Things like www.asp.net,
with the free video tutorials,
samples, documentation etc. Free,
official and reliably updated
information from MSDN.
Enterprise scalable and decent
performance.
Fully object-oriented, (semi)compiled
languages, allowing for sound design,
patterns and practices.
There are of course weaknesses as well, like:
Pricing, once you go live with
anything semi-serious.
Vendor lock-in.
Total lack of cross-platform support.
I have spent some time this evening trying to get a grip on how things are outside of the microsoft world, and
I have found loads of PHP frameworks, Ruby on Rails and relatives, several Java frameworks and a few very odd alternatives.
Some of these seem very interesting, so I would like to hear from actual developers using the different frameworks, and try to find out how they compare to what MS has at the moment.
Which framework are you using, why is it great, what could be better and what kind of sites have you built using it?
Jeff & co made most of Stack Overflow in a few months using ASP.NET MVC. If you had to do the same using a non-MS framework and tools, what would you pick and why?

We have a pretty heavy investment in the Microsoft framework at the office and so I'm mostly doing ASP.NET MVC stuff now. If I were to pick an alternative at this point, I'd probably go with RubyOnRails. It has a very clean MVC implementation -- playing around with it made it pretty easy to get started with ASP.NET MVC when it came along. There's also a lot going on with improving testability -- particularly natural language-like testing frameworks coming out of the RoR camp with Cucumber, et. al. All the investment in testing makes TDD/BDD much more natural in that framework.

If I wanted to go opensource I would go with:
RAD web development: tomcat running Railo, a Java based open source CFML implementation because CFML is a good RAD tool. Railo performs well, is capable of clustering, is able to be extended through editing the source or adding your own extensions.
DB: MySQL for a DB backend because it performs well and just works.
IDE: - Eclipse + CFEclipse because that is what's available, although I want some improvements. Since CFML is a dynamic language you don't have Intellisense, just context help for the api.
OS: Any opensource unix based OS. Probably Ubuntu.
MVC Frameworks: Mach-II or Model-Glue because I'm familiar with them, although I'm open to checking out ColdBox.

I build web apps with:
PHP
Zend Framework
ExtJS toolkit
Aptana IDE
Disadvantages are the typical ones: lack of integration between the tools, weakness of debugging tools, complexity of deployment (although the deployment issue is true for pretty much anything except ASP when you're talking about windows servers).
I'm not too aware of ASP.NET, having only marginal experience with it, but the advantages as I would see them are cross-platform support, cheap hosting ability, architectural control (PHP is more low level, and Zend Framework is easy to buy into one module at a time, so you can more strictly control the behavior of each page).

I am using Django. It is easy to learn, very well documented and most of the brainy stuff happens in Python (assuming you like python). I develop all my HTML and CSS by hand using Aptana - gives better control but has nice helpful features.
Using many IDEs / editors you can get auto-complete based on the Django code-base (Netbeans, PyScripter, Komodo). You can then host on either Windows or Unix (Linux, Solaris, Mac).

Running Apache Geronimo in production

If you're running Apache Geronimo in production why did you choose it over other application servers and what are your experiences with running Geronimo in production?
Can you also please share what servlet engine you decided to use (Tomcat/Jetty) and why you made this decision?
UPDATE: So far this question got two up-votes and one star but no answer. I'm starting to wonder, is anyone using Apache Geronimo at all? My logic would be, if you use Geronimo for development you'd also use it for deployment. Right? So, does that mean that no one is using Geronimo at all?

We definitely use Geronimo in production!
We have used the Tomcat version since 1.0, about four years ago as I recall. We are currently running mostly 2.1.1.4.
One of our apps gets about 1 million page views per day. The others are nowhere near that, but they are important apps that need to work well.
Our choice was based primarily on:
Price: At the time our company started using Java, we weren't sure what we needed out of an app server. So we decided to start at free and work our way up, if needed.
Basic features: I had experience with WebSphere (base/ND) and plain old Tomcat. Geronimo had the J2EE features we wanted, all within a lightweight package.
Open Source: Our primary client that we use Java for required Open Source.
Familiarity: Being an Apache-based server, we were already comfortable with Tomcat, OpenJPA, Axis web services, and others. Furthermore, we were comfortable with the Apache community as far as bug tracking and other minor things.
Support: We expected to be mostly on our own, but knowing that the Apache community was active was important. As was the availability of commercial support from IBM, as we are an IBM Business Partner.
Our experience has been great overall. The servers are very reliable. I search our logs once in awhile and sometimes see weird errors with a database connection, an EJB call, but those are pretty rare (and quite possibly our code's fault).
Performance is impressive. I joke that we could run Geronimo from my laptop and the clients wouldn't see a difference. Give it any decent server and it will purr along for months.
I'm not sure how many people actual run Geronimo. I'm rather confused about that. I've seen slides (years ago) that listed some big names like eBay using it. The mailing list is active but sometimes seems like only the Geronimo team communicating with each other.
The only serious bug I've run into is this one. It is a big deal to us, but of course Geronimo is free and I don't expect them to fix bugs that are important just to me.
I've been meaning to check out Apache TomEE server, wondering if it is more actively or openly used. Just to see how the community and usage compares to Geronimo.

WebSphere community edition is Geronimo. So IBM chose it as a platform of choice.
When choosing an application server, you're really choosing the APIs you want to use in your application and maybe the administration interface (but you only use that once in a while).

Answer to your update: It just means that SO users are not using Geronimo or are all busy voting and making witty comments.
There seems to be quite a bit of acivity on Geronimo's mailing list, and I would say that you'll get better results there.