Eduardo Martins: Mobicents Team Meeting 2010, Antalya

Lets start this way, it's getting better every year, for sure it was the best Mobicents/JBCP team meeting ever! Participants included the developers team, quality assurance, documentation, product management and for the first time customers and community.

Regarding the participation of customers and community, how valuable is to be able to have fun, discuss and rework roadmaps in real time with the team behind the platform? In my humble opinion this meeting is just the first step to a broader event around the platform, JBoss World and generic Java events are not really our playground, I sincerely think that next year we can aim higher, double the number of participants and maybe count with presentations from customers/community.

Rafting pirates

So the meeting started with a "lets just have fun" day, where we went for a full day of rafting in a Turkish river. Great time for sure, just check the photo above, amazing uh? :-) I believe this is the right way to start such an event, breaking the ice, establishing everyone as good old friends.

Meeting room

Enough about fun (for now), we defined three days and half for presentations and discussions. As usual we went through platform projects, mainly reviewing last year achievements and shortcomings, and then defining what will be the next year. In between we had a few interesting "training" sessions to better understand what we are talking about. Personally speaking I really enjoying discussing Diameter and SS7 protocol details and the Media Server challenges and solutions. Clustering was also a topic in almost every presentation, it shown how serious the team got into it in the last year. Unfortunately we had no time to talk about everything in detail, we had to rush a few presentations, and some topics were almost not discussed such as SIP Presence, IP PBX, Seam Telco, a sign that we need to extend the meeting time some say, others say that we are simply stretching our resources too much, something to review in another time and blog post for sure.

Mobicents JAIN SLEE Presentation

Regarding my main activity, leading the JAIN SLEE container development, I had half a day of very happy presentation, we had such a great year, lots of community activity, a very successful 2.x release, a huge (over 80% for sure) rework of the old generation. We did 8 (eight) binary releases, and half were of major type, that is, not simply bug fixes and stack updates, or service packs as many like to say. We achieved four times the performance of the 1.x, very very low latency values, high availability and fault tolerance, user guide documentation for every module, and over 5000 community downloads, an incredible number for a specific project. In the end of the "season" we also started with the discussion on the JAIN SLEE standard evolution, as seen on my recent posts, creating new development models, meeting the community needs, transforming the Mobicents community into the specs playground for innovation. Yes, as you can probably guess, I am that happy with the achievements :-)

Of course, it's never perfect, we had shortcomings too, specifically we failed to meet several release dates (yet last ones were on time). We had almost null contributions on new code - don't get me wrong the community provided us great feedback for bug fixing and that is priceless too - what in my opinion is the result of weak developer oriented documentation, such as code guides. Another pain point is the Jopr web console, we clearly did not achieve what we wanted, we were not able to get around UI limitations, performance is a deception and the fact that is not ready to run, that is, you need to setup every time you download, is not a good thing also. Finally we did almost nothing to improve Eclipse SLEE plugin, which now clearly doesn't match our way of developing RAs or Examples. Correct, nobody is happy with shortcomings, but what matters is how you solve them, and we have a plan to fix each during next year.

The presentation went also through the major new features released last year, namely:

- Container's core modularization and SPI

- Server's state replication

- Fault Tolerant RA API

- Congestion Control

- Event Router Stats and Execution Mapper

- Simplified Global Logging Configuration

- New or Reworked RAs (JCC, ISUP, MAP, XCAP Client)

- Jopr Web Console

- Enhanced or simplified external SLEE Connection.

Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.2.0

Also important was the introduction to the release that is about to come out, 2.2.0, with an overview of major new features:

- Part I of clustering performance enhancements (8x compared with 2.1.2)

- Buddy groups clustering

- Twiddle Command Line Interface (CLI), which we believe will be a major tool for developers and platform administrators

- Part I of JAIN SLEE 1.1 Extensions, specially the one which allows JAIN SLEE Libraries to depend on other SLEE component types, such as RA Types

- Eclipse SLEE Plugin 2.0

- SMPP v5 Resource Adaptor

- Misc performance optimizations on SLEE facilities, such as Tracers

Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2010/11 Roadmap Draft

Last but not least, the next year roadmap draft, targeting 15th January 2011 for the first BETA version of 3.x, which main features are:

- JAIN SLEE 1.1 Extensions: Annotations & ConfigProperties

- Jopr Web Console 2.x (or something else if we are not able to solve current version limitations)

- EclipSLEE 2.1

- Mobicents Cluster Framework 3.x with Advanced Buddy Groups features such as high performance intra group broadcasting of notifications

- Second wave of SS7 RAs

- JSR 309 RA

The first Candidate Release of 3.x should be done around March 15th and if everything goes ok should have a FINAL production quality and carrier grade release around April 15th. Later during the year we plan to keep pushing the way for a new refined JAIN SLEE spec, more on that soon since it's still rough and unpolished ideas.

More fun

SLEE vs SIP Servlets? :)

Yes, fun was not only about rafting, every day we had 2h for pool time and (optional ah ah) lunch, and at night you could always count with resort's great shows, such as brazilian Samba, Shaolin Monks, Ukraine gym stars in a "Cirque du Solei" type show, and then late night talks with team members, unstressed by some wine or fine drink. There was also time for shopping or some more water sports like jetsky or windsurf.

Flying shaolins

The brazilian samba team

Very important to the event's success was the meeting place, Alva Donna, in Belek - Antalya, Turkey, a 5 star all inclusive resort, it is so pretty, the food and drinks are great, the staff is very friendly and made their best to treat us as very special people. Really recommended place, and definitely we will come back another year, just dunno when.