Mobicents is now maven'ized

Mobicents team has mavenized all their code including Mobicents SLEE Server, Sip Servlet Server, Media Server, XDM Server and all the examples. This could be a bit painful for users who are deep into ant and never looked at maven before. However once you start using it you will realize the power of maven and will understand the principle of maven of managing a project's build, reporting, doccumentation from a central piece of information known as pom.xml

For beginners look at link http://maven.apache.org/users/index.html

I have briefly looked at book Better Builds with Maven and can recommend for starters.

Review of book 'Internet Multimedia Communications Using SIP'

Last week I completed book Internet Multimedia Communications Using SIP from Rogelio Martinez Perea. This book is definitely recommended for beginners trying to learn SIP, even veterans can clarify their doubts using this book. The book points to all the RFC and JSR's where ever applicable and hence acts as good reference. Book refers to Mobicents as open source implementation of JAIN SLEE and NIST SIP stack as implementation of JAIN SIP. In fact all the examples are built using the JAIN SIP stack and Java Media Framework (JMF) for media. This shows how Open Source is making an impact in VoIP world :)

The part that I felt could be improved is the explanation of SIP Transaction Sub Layer.

Presentations on Mobicents and JAIN SLEE

The Converged Application presentation at JBoss World 2008 is now uploaded, follow the link http://www.jbossworld.com/downloads/pdf/friday/2-25_NEW_Web_2_and_Communications_Building_Converged_Applications_Amit_Bhayani_JBoss.pdf

The JAIN SLEE presentation at IndicThreads Conference 2007 (Video) is uploaded, follow the link
http://www.indicthreads.com/videos/1157/java_jslee_j2ee_voip.html

JBoss World 2008 - Orlando, Florida

This JBW event was the biggest in JBoss history with 700+ attendees from all over the world and fortunately this was the first one that I too got a chance to attend. I was also a speaker for Mobicents technology. The presentation 'Web 2.0 and Converged Application' would be uploaded soon http://www.jbossworld.com/downloads/presentations/. It was fun to meet all the JBoss developers, but the most exciting part was to meet most of the team members of Mobicents

The Mobicents Team!!

Left to right

Alex, Bartek, Luis, Eduardo, Vladimir, Amit and Jean

We are already 9 in Mobicents team and have out numbered any other individual team within JBoss. Quite a few guys were surprised to know that Mobicents has such a big team! But what they don't realize is Mobicents has number of sub-projects which in itself is huge. Here is the list

1. Mobicents Core – SLEE implementation

2. Sip Servlets implementation

3. XDM Server

4. Media Server

5. There are number of Resource Adaptors

6. Mobicents Management Console

7. Eclipse IDE Plugin

The speech on 'Web 2.0 and Converged Application' was good, specially the Convergde Demo at the end excited the attendees! There is definitely a paradigm shift with introduction of Open Source implementation of JAIN SLEE (Mobicents).

JBoss Communication Platform creates buzz in India and Indian sub continents

22nd Oct 2007 - Delhi, India
One of the newspaper reported that India has 250Mn user using either Mobile or Fixed line telephone. And if the momentum continues then by 2010 there will be 500Mn users. Double in 3 years!!!

Along with Tom (Director of Telcom Domain, RedHat) we visited few of the top Telco operators in India to understand what is their view on Service Delivery Platform (SDP) and what they feel about next generation communication. It was pleasing to hear that these companies have already started to think unconventional and provide convergence of voice, video and data to their end customers.

The JBCP (Mobicents Project) offering from RedHat provides exactly the same platform that these companies are looking for. In fact most of the SDP's that are used are proprietary and you need to pay tons of $ to use these. While status quo is Open Source, the Operators are realizing that embracing technology like JBCP can save lot of their money which they can spend to create further value for their end customers.

23rd Oct 2007 - Delhi
RedHat organised the Telco event which was attended by at least 100 people from different verticals like Operators, ISV's, OEM's, NEP's and RedHat partners. The flow of the event was on how JBCP can help each of these verticals and how creating an EcoSystem across JBCP can be the win-win situation for all of us. After the event I did a demo on Converged Application where I used Seam DVD example which fires an event to JAIN SLEE (Mobicents) and the service logic within Mobicents (SBB) makes a call to user asking to confirm the order placed online. The user is asked to press 1 to accept and 2 to decline. The communication between JEE and JAIN SLEE happens in asynchronous fashion. SBB uses the TTS RA, Media RA and Persistence RA to complete the business cycle.

24th Oct 2007 - Colombo, Srilanka
Srilankan community has adopted open source long back and are already aware of its benefits. Tom and I meet few of the top telco operators including Dialog and STL. Its mind boggling to see how the country is advancing in terms of telco technology and even India's no 1 operator Airtel will be starting the service soon in Srilanka. Just like we expected they were very much interested to understand the SDP offering of RedHat and how they can leverage the open source with JBCP. The Telco event organized by Manoj (Country Manager, Srilanka) was simply amazing and was attended by 115+ guys.

26th and 27th Oct 2007 - IndicThreads, Pune
I attended the IndicThreads conference with very high note on 26th Oct, but was disappointed to see most of people from service industry only. Presented on JAIN SLEE technology on 27th Oct 2007 which was attended by few guys. The presentation material will be uploaded by IndicThreads soon on http://conference.indicthreads.com/

In fact as we speak the first release of JBCP is already uploaded on JBoss repository for you to download and try http://repository.jboss.com/jboss/jbcp/

HTTP Client Review

HTTP Client from Apache (http://commons.apache.org/httpclient/) is well known api and is in use mostly for testing the web application. However over the time HTTP Client has become mature and can be integrated with any application built using Java. While I have used HTTP Client for one of the Resource Adaptor's for Mobicents http://groups.google.com/group/mobicents-public/web/mobicents-http-client-ra I didn't like the concept of Request and Response being represented by same API. For example


HttpClient client = new HttpClient();

// Create a method instance.
GetMethod method = new GetMethod("http://amitbhayani.blogspot.com/");

// Execute the method.
int statusCode = client.executeMethod(method);

//Get the Response
byte[] responseBody = method.getResponseBody();


As you can see the instance of GetMethod is used to send the request as well as receive response. This is a bit ambiguous and different api for Request and Response makes a lot of sense.

To overcome this limitation Apache is coming up with HttpCore. You can call HttpCore as advanced version of HTTPClien which has all the features of old api but in a cleaner way and also some more additions.

I am waiting for HttpCore to bit stabilize and become mature and will then integrate with Mobicents HTTP Client Resource Adaptor

SIP integrated with SOA answer to Intelligent JEE Application

With evolution of telecommunication the demand for real time communication is increasing day by day in any JEE application. For example as soon as user makes any bank account transaction using bank's online portal the portal should send a SMS to phone registered against that user. As soon as there is checkout in shopping portal by a customer the details of Order should reach to administrator either as a SMS or as a phone call (using the text to speech conversion technology). As soon as the stock price passes the target price set by the client, stock portal should send an SMS or make a call. As soon as there is transaction on Credit Card, SMS should be sent to user. Its not limited to passing the information on phone but also interactive communication that should take place between the communication device and web application like unless and until user approves of credit card transaction by his/her phone the credit card is not charged!

Can SIP be the answer?
SIP, the session intitation protocol, is the IETF protocol for VOIP and other text and multimedia sessions, like instant messaging, video, online games and other services. SIP is very much like HTTP, the Web protocol, or SMTP. Messages consist of headers and a message body.

SOA represents a popular architectural paradigm that advocates an approach in which a software component provides its functionality as a service that can be leveraged by other software components. SOA allows the integration of existing systems, applications and users into a flexible architecture that can easily accommodate changing needs. Integrated design, reuse of existing IT investments and above all, industry standards are the elements needed to create a robust SOA.

JBoss ESB is the answer to SOA and Mobicents for SIP. As of today JBoss ESB doesn't provide any simple way to integrate the SIP but may be in future we can have a Resource Adaptor which acts as Gateway that can act as point of communication between the SIP Server and ESB.