Eduardo Martins

The Future of Mobicents, from Sunset to Sunrise

2012-01-03T15:04:00.000Z

October 2010, I wrote here how good was the 2010 Mobicents Team Meeting, how it was the best Mobicents event ever, how the event was morphing itself by including customers and community for the first time, etc.

December 2011, I started traveling to Sochi (Russia), the venue for 2011 Mobicents Team Meeting, and I was a bit nervous, expectations for the event were huge, the number of participants doubled again (like I predicted it was now much more than just a team meeting), so to me it was clear that the event would be even better this year, no matter what...

But a month before Red Hat decided to sunset JBoss Communications Platform, the product built from Mobicents, and then part of the team, including Ivelin Ivanov, the lead of the platform, left Red Hat to start a new company, Telestax, with the goal of taking over Red Hat on the role of leading development and support of Mobicents. I decided to stay at Red Hat for (at least) the next 6 months, taking the responsibility to lead JBCP till sunset, that is, ensure that all support contract SLAs will not breach till the end. Alex and Bartosz also decided to stay, which means that the whole Mobicents SLEE and Diameter core developers did not move to Telestax. On top of that, and as expected, Red Hat has no interest in continuing to work on Mobicents, a scenario that could obviously put in danger the roadmap of Mobicents SLEE and Diameter, this was truly bothering me.

But then the event was truly great, fulfilled all my best expectations, it started with a full day of 3rd parties presentations, including Twilio and Voxeo on the new cloud battle front, and went through all the usual Mobicents project reviews and roadmap presentation/discussion. Personally I'm very grateful to meet so much new talent face to face, everyone that was there for the first time was a standout! Obviously I was also very happy to hear that Mobicents SLEE was truly rocking the world, comments like "A Mobicents SLEE node never goes down" or "Mobicents SLEE is running for about an year, with 0 failures, it just works" made me truly blush.

The meeting schedule included an 1 hour slot for Mobicents SLEE, where it was expected my presentation of the achievements and shortcomings for 2011, including a detailed overview on the new features developed, and the introduction of the 2012 roadmap. A day before I organized a meeting with the people present that was somehow involved in Mobicents SLEE development, to explain to everyone the whole Red Hat/Telestax situation, and agree on a roadmap for only the first half of 2012, since that's when the transition process must be completed, no matter what. We ended up freezing development of the 3.x branch, postponing also the developments around new management interfaces, and the XMPP Server RA, but the latter mostly due to not much interest shown by the Apache Vysper team to work on that.

With respect to my presentation (click here to download the slides), it was a pleasure to do it, the audience was great, and 2011 was a great year for Mobicents SLEE, with lots of releases, lots of new features, lots of binary release downloads (~7000, a 40% increase). The standout of the shortcomings was again the lack of code development done by community members, which I sincerely hope that changes in 2012, due to the special circumstances. On the new roadmap, and the reasoning behind it, I felt it was understood, and this was very important.

I sincerely believe that the project transition to a startup like Telestax is a good move, and I trust that the new company succeeds gathering enough interest and human resources to make Mobicents the comercial success that it truly deserves to be. I can't guarantee that I will be on board soon or ever, I really love working at Red Hat, and I will also have to consider any great 3rd party opportunities, but whatever happens in the next 6 months, and whoever leads the project after that, Mobicents SLEE is now too big to depend on me or someone else, and that is a great accomplishment.

A few words on the event organization, thank you Oleg, for all your work and commitment, the meeting hotel was not that great, and we did not have the expected ski fun, but I felt that everything in the schedule went smooth, and I think that everyone who participated was truly involved and happy, and that is what really matters...

A "few" 2011 Mobicents Meeting participants at Sochi

See you all next year... hopefully :-)

New Mobicents JAIN SLEE and SIP Presence Service Releases

2011-10-11T11:34:00.001+01:00

In case you missed the announcements, Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.5.0.FINAL and Mobicents SIP Presence 1.0.0.FINAL were released and are now available for download.

Mobicents SIP Presence 1.0.0.CR1 released

2011-06-27T10:54:00.001+01:00

Hi there, say hello to Mobicents SIP Presence Service 1.0.0.CR1, the first
candidate release for the popular open source SIP Presence service
implementation, now adding RCS to supported standard networks.

What is new?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

1) Performance & Stability:
+-- Latest SLEE 2.4.1.FINAL;
+-- Optimized SLEE app code, taking full advantage of custom Mobicents
JAIN SLEE 1.1 Extensions;
+-- Several issues fixed;
+-- Network Simulation tools ensures stable memory and performance
behavior on long runs.

2) XDM Server:
+-- XCAP Diff interface completed, fully compatible with RFC 5875, support
for XML Patch Ops included;
+-- IETF Presence Document Content Manipulation (RFC 4827) XCAP App
Usage, for storage of permanent presence state;
+-- OMA XDM 2.0 Presence Content XCAP App Usage, for storage of content
such as status icons;
+-- Optimized XCAP App Usage management, pooling of instances not
needed anymore;
+-- XCAP Diff Super Users support, these will have authorization to subscribe
changes in any document or collection.

3) Presence and Resource Lists Servers:
+-- Pres Rules Transformations, documents are now used not only to authorize
presence subscriptions, but to transform the presence state notified. Polite
blocking supported too;
+-- Service that monitors permanent presence state in the XDMS, such state is
then composed with the state published through SIP;
+-- Extended Accepted Presence Content:
- OMA Extensions to PIDF and Presence Data Model, OMA PDE 1.0, OMA
PDE 1.1
- IETF RFCs 3863, 4479, 4480, 4481, 4482, 4199, 5196;
+-- Simpler extension of accepted presence content, just drop xsd files in
related configuration directory and the server will automatically combine all
to achieve the supported documents schema;
+-- JAXB replaced with DOM in publication and subscription interfaces, faster
and better validation of state published, no unneeded XML namespaces in the
notified state;
+-- Multiple event packages now supported in the SIP Event Publication
Control, opens the door for the support of other publishing services in the
integrated server.

What is included?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+-- Mobicents XDM Server standalone installed in JBoss AS + Mobicents
JAIN SLEE (mobicents-sip-presence-xdms-1.0.0.CR1.zip)
+-- Mobicents XDM Server and Mobicents SIP Presence Servers integrated
installed in JBboss AS + Mobicents JAIN SLEE, plus two example
presence aware JAIN SLEE applications pre-deployed
(mobicents-sip-presence-integrated-1.0.0.CR1.zip)
+-- Mobicents SIP Presence Service binary package that you can use to
install XDM or Integrated servers in JBoss AS + Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.4.1.FINAL
(mobicents-sip-presence-1.0.0.CR1.zip)

Download URL:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mobicents/files/Mobicents%20SIP%20Presence%20Service/1.0.0.CR1

Enjoy.

Update for SAKURA

2011-06-22T14:06:00.000+01:00

There you go, first update for Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.4 a.k.a. SAKURA, click here for the release announcement and the download link.

iMessage: Apple vs Operators Pt.2

2011-06-07T15:03:00.000+01:00

Apple yesterday unveiled 10 key features of iOS 5, and iMessage app is one of these, a mobile IM client, which I suspect includes SMS integration, as I don't see Apple having two message systems in iOS.

Including or not integration between IM and SMS, this will be the second Apple stab to traditional telco operators revenue - Facetime was #1 - since iOS will exchange free messages among iOS users, perhaps even OSX users at some point (same route as Facetime), going around SMS. Of course, IM is nothing new, just like video calling was nothing new, but what is relevant here, is that #1 mobile platform (according to yesterday's keynote) is replacing/extending the standard mobile device messaging system, SMS, with IM, and that opens doors for a much clever system, and where the traditional telco operator is not involved, other than be the data pipe if 3G is used instead of Wi-Fi.

The details about iMessage system are almost none, besides what you can view at the keynote video (iMessage is announced at around 1h and 11min), the Apple SVP just slips the detail that it will use the proven and reliable Apple Push Notification System, which serves billions of notifications. If I remember correctly this system uses XMPP. In humble opinion Apple is in the right direction, choosing finest standards for each functionality needed, SIP for call control, XMPP for IM.

In my mind there are a few doubts for what is coming next, the first about iOS 6, will there be an iVoice/iCall, closing the circle and providing a final stab into operators? The second, related with Android, will Google turn GTalk the main messaging system too, with SMS integration, and put SMS as "past" feature for old mobile phones? The third related with all mobile OSes, will there be any interop?

Hello SLEE World JAIN SLEE Tutorial

2011-05-07T14:21:00.002+01:00

Yes, I finally managed to get some time and do a new tutorial for JAIN SLEE beginners, using Mobicents JAIN SLEE, Eclipse and our EclipSLEE plugin, please check it out ... and leave some feedback, alright? Thanks in advance.

Mobicents JAIN SLEE Development Environment Setup

2011-05-04T02:29:00.000+01:00

Want to setup the development environment to work with Mobicents JAIN SLEE but no clue how or where to start? Maybe this tutorial will help ;-)

Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.4.0.FINAL released

2011-05-03T11:16:00.000+01:00

Mobicents JAIN-SLEE 2.4.0.FINAL, the first stable version of SAKURA, is now available for download. Standouts for the release:

Refined JAIN SLEE container startup, shutdown and deployment phases
ChildRelationExt and SbbLocalObjectExt JAIN SLEE 1.1 Extensions
Fault Tolerant Timer for FT Resource Adaptor API
JDBC Resource Adaptor
TFTP Server Resource Adaptor
Candidate Release for all Application Enablers
EclipSLEE 2.0.0.BETA3
Mobicents SS7 1.0.0.BETA8

Read the complete release announcement here, or skip that and download it here.

Mobicents SLEE Maven Plugins Go FINAL

2011-04-26T10:47:00.000+01:00

Hello, FINAL versions of the SLEE Maven Plugins released:

The only change regarding last candidate releases is the possibility of adding security permissions in the library plugin.

Custom JBoss AS Deployment Ordering

2011-04-01T12:58:00.002+01:00

Sometimes you need to deploy complex applications which touch different standards/platform, for instance a SLEE application which interacts with a Java EE component, and in such case it is important that each part of the system deploys (and undeploys) in correct order. In JBoss AS5 and 6 it is possible to setup a custom deploy order by using some specific meta data, and I just create an article on how to do it, check it out.

Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.4.0.CR1 released!

2011-03-28T19:00:00.002+01:00

Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.4.0.CR1, codenamed SAKURA, the first LGPL release of the popular open source container, is now available for download. Check the announcement at http://goo.gl/lfE9S.

Mobicents is now fully LGPL 2.1!!!

2011-03-02T11:40:00.000Z

That's right, Red Hat decided to change the licenses of all Mobicents projects, including JAIN SLEE and SIP Presence, to LGPL. I believe this will allow the community to grow even more, and hopefully, increase 3rd party code contributions.

Mobicents JAIN SLEE Maven Plugins Update

2011-03-02T11:31:00.004Z

New versions of the Maven plugins for Mobicents JAIN SLEE can be found on JBoss Maven repository, which are compatible with Maven 2.x and 3.x:

Maven DU Plugin 2.0.0.CR1 - a plugin which creates JAIN SLEE deployable units
Maven Library Plugin 1.0.0.CR1 - a plugin which creates JAIN SLEE Library jars

A couple of articles were added to the new Mobicents wiki at jboss.org, explaining how the plugins may be used.

UPDATE 1: CR1 versions of both plugins had an issue with the plugins descriptor, both are fixed in new versions:

Maven DU Plugin 2.0.0.CR2
Maven Library Plugin 1.0.0.CR2

UPDATE 2: A couple more issues were found with DU Plugin CR2, with respect to bundling services, a new fixed version is already available:

Maven DU Plugin 2.0.0.CR3

Also, all the RA, Enabler and Example projects of components bundled with the Mobicents JAIN SLEE release now use the newest plugin versions. A few examples:

Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.3.0.FINAL released!

2011-01-17T23:02:00.001Z

Hello there, Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.3.0.FINAL, codenamed SUPERSONIC, is now available for download, so what are you waiting for? Get all the details about the release, including the download link, at http://goo.gl/e3vMF

The Rich Communication Suite

2010-12-28T14:55:00.000Z

The first time I heard about RCS, this year, when a company asked if Mobicents SIP Presence Service (MSPS) was compliant, I was curious about what it was, but I promised myself, after 6 months struggling without a MSPS release, we would not dive into another layer of over complicated specs, no way we would consider one more possible dead end. In short, we ignored it… till another company asked about the same thing, and another one, and it kept going… In the end of last summer we were involved in a big RCS network plan, and it was perfectly clear to me, the SIP Presence industry was asking for RCS, and RCS only. So I went through an evaluation of what was RCS about, to finally decide if MSPS should embrace it.

RCS stands for Rich Communication Suite, and it is a suite of IP telco standards, which works out other standards. Confusing, the least… RCS is done by the GSMA workgroup, and does not defines any new technology… What? This is getting weird! My first thoughts, also the fact that it was done in IMS fashion, through numbered "Release"s, made me fear the worst, after all the GSMA members possibly overlap with 3GPP and OMA, chances it could be the same people, using same methodologies, drawing the RCS specs.

So I spent some time reading the specs and let me tell you, one must praise GSMA work, quite simply, RCS takes on IMS and OMA specs, rearrange them, simplify as much as possible, so it can be applied to today's networks and services, as fast as possible, an using agile methodologies! Sounds great, sign me in!

Wait a minute, I know, some would say it is all wrong, we should instead had first the basic layer, the RCS simplicity, and only then we should have it extended to provide the zillion features IMS has, and which nobody cares or needs. Not a surprise, I fully agree with such view. Also some say it is too late, that the consumer already decided for services which are not provided by operators, maybe not, hopefully not, in my humble opinion, RCS may be the very last chance, at least for SIP Presence.

Let me try to give you an insight of what we are talking about, RCS has 3 releases, each upgrades the previous one. I will focus on SIP Presence only, but RCS touches more than SIP Presence, it also works other services such as IM.

RCS Release 1 evolves around the concept of the Enhanced Address Book (EAB), an evolution of the usual address book. In short the address book is decorated with enriched information, coming from different services. This plays nicely with today's wishes for cloud stored information, unified social networks status updates, contact content such as portrait icons. I'm not going into technical details, but I for sure am someone who is aware of the design issues around SIP Presence, its hard time scaling due to huge traffic, the dozens of ugly workarounds to make it work, and RCS is a nice step forward into the right direction, there are simple decisions that deeply simplify the network design, making it more like "old" presence networks, which simply work. One remark, it takes quite an effort to define this endorsing IMS and OMA, 27 pages of functional description, plus 39 of technical realization, it should be a lesson for everyone in these standard bodies when defining more extensions or new versions.

The RCS Release 2 effort focuses on enabling access to rich communication services from a wider range of devices. In short it tells that the user has multiple devices, for instance a mobile phone and a PC, possibly concurring for services, and adapts Release 1 for that. It also introduces the Network Address Book, which is just the realization that the EAB needs to be in the network and sync the multiple user devices.

The RCS Release 3 mostly consolidates Release 2 features, and adds some minor enhancements, such as preparing the network for different usages of it, for instance users with devices, which are not connected to mobile network, instead only have broadband connections. In my humble opinion a very important and positive decision, it's about time to consider these scenarios and find out new opportunities. It is weird to say this, but the fact that the industry finally acknowledges that content sharing between two users may happen off the voice/video session is a victory, welcome to the world not session centric. Can you imagine what would be the outcome if we have specs that release the session protocols from all these extra services almost nobody uses, how much simpler, cheaper and efficient the session networks, services and clients would be?

As I said, RCS is a big step in the right direction, a revolution without new technology. For MSPS you can expect to target RCS compliancy as soon as possible, as a matter of fact the developing tasks for such work area already in the Issue Tracker, with a total estimation of about 200h of work, at this point we just need to understand what 3rd parties are interested to collaborate, to come up with a release date, Mobicents does not have the resources to walk this path alone, or perhaps I should say, not before it may be too late. Please get in touch with me if you are interested in contributing. We know that RCS needs Mobicents too, an open source implementation with a strong community behind it.

Stay tuned.

References and Additional Resources:

• RCS Homepage
• RCS Release Documents
• RCS Market Survey

Will SIP ever take off?

2010-12-13T16:36:00.003Z

It has been crossing my mind that this can really happen...

1) Talk time telco plans will morph into data plans, and it won't take that long, starting in well developed countries. Absurd data plan prices will be gone, no matter how hard traditional telco operators would like to avoid that to happen.

2) Once data plans spread to most phones, web/cloud based communication services will compete hard to become the new global voice operators, chances are that the mobile OS vendors (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nokia?) and sites like Facebook will become the major players.

3) None of these, except Nokia, seems a fan of SIP...

About GPL License on Mobicents - Part II

2010-12-08T13:09:00.000Z

Hi all, a final and quick follow up on last post matter, the Mobicents community asked for concrete use cases where GPL linkage would be applied, and concrete information on how to apply for "the free ride". Well it was decided to not list such cases, neither there will be an automated "get a free ride" system, instead all interested should get in touch with us for a proper handling of each specific case, that is of course if you can't or don't want to apply for JBCP subscription, or want to open your code.

About GPL License on Mobicents

2010-11-25T00:53:00.000Z

From time to time people get doubts on the licensing terms of Mobicents and JBoss Communications Platform (JBCP), which uses a double license scheme, very common in comercial open source projects. Mobicents is free but gets restricted by GPL (except Sip Servlets, which is LGPL), while JBCP removes every constraints. With this post I will try to clarify what does that GPL means for Mobicents team and users.

Lets "talk" a bit about the GPL license, something that is never clear enough, the more you dig the more abstract it becomes. The Wikipedia page about GPL is a very good source of information, it identifies the "linking" between two software parts as a possible conflict situation, and presents different interpretations on that. In summary, if the linking is real then the software part which linked to a GPL software, must now follow a few rules, one of these is to have the source code published. In that Wikipedia page, after you read about some of the main features, starts on famous trials, A sues B, X sues Y, etc. In every case it involves a 3rd party that redistributed GPL code but either closed the sources, sometimes even hiding the presence of the GPL code, or changed the license. It can also be seen, in all those cases, that only the ones redistributing were making some kind of profit, and most refused to share that profit in any particular way.

With respect to Mobicents vs 3rd party components, we are not really able to extract if a deployed 3rd party application needs to be GPL, note that even if 3rd party code only imports Java or JSR API classes, in the end it needs Mobicents GPL code to run. Being sincere, only judges and attorneys decide the outcome, and probably some will have different interpretations too. If you ask for my personal opinion, I would say that yes it needs to be GPL, but simply because that removes all chances of being wrong!

OK probably there is now some panic, people using Mobicents in production with closed sources or not GPL!!! Relax, there are two ways to forget about GPL:

1. You are having a benefit from it and make money. Then you should be fair, get a support contract and use JBCP instead in production. The Mobicents team does not works for free. And of course we work a lot to ensure that JBCP is the real deal, there are SLAs, there is a very successful company behind you, a company ensuring you succeed. The cost is cheaper than competition and also each case is a different case (and price), we do not want to make customers less competitive because they use JBCP.

2: You can't pay now but you are helping improve the platform, lets be partners then, official or not, and then in exchange you get a free ride. The free ride means that the GPL linkage stuff is ignored, be it a real problem or not. But note, no SLA of any kind.

Sincerely, we believe any good and fair usage will match one of these cases. Now what is your opinion?

Mobicents SIP Presence Service at mobicents.org

2010-11-24T16:01:00.000Z

A quick update, Mobicents SIP Presence now has a section at mobicents.org, soon current docs and roadmap will be added too.

Roadmap for Mobicents JAIN SLEE 3.0

2010-11-22T13:01:00.000Z

You can now see the draft roadmap for Mobicents JAIN SLEE 3.0 at mobicents.org. In summary we are going to implement the more radical JAIN SLEE 1.1 extensions, Java annotations (community discussion to start soon) and the advanced ConfigProperties idea, which should result in a very different programming model. But changes/enhancements will touch the whole platform:

Cluster Enhancements: More flexible framework (with respect to what is used as datasource to hold clustered state), a more useful and feature rich buddy groups setup
Resource Adaptors: JSR 309 finally, a easy to customize "example" JDBC/Datasource RA, same for a Web Services Client RA, and an alternative Http Server RA that does not relies on HTTP Servlets
Service Enablers: continue the work started by the XDM Client, providing ready to integrate enablers for SLEE applications
Web Console 3.x: still a bit undefined at this point, but very high chances that we will have the "old" web console back, and leave Jopr/JBoss ON just for monitoring

We have set the first Beta version for the end of January, and set all the new stuff for such release, but note that it is expected some to miss the train and jump in later releases, the task list is so big. Still, our compromise is that in the middle of the year we will have the first FINAL release, and such release will have everything production quality and carrier grade.

Finally, if you have been wanting to contribute but not able to understand how, this time is a great opportunity to step in, it's specially easy to contribute on components such as the new resource adaptors and enablers.

All feedback is welcome so please let us know what's in your mind.

Mobicents SIP Presence 1.0.0.BETA6 released!

2010-11-18T15:03:00.000Z

That's right, finally a new release for Mobicents SIP Presence. Please check out the release announcement, lots of enhancements.

Join the Mobicents team!

2010-11-16T17:36:00.003Z

The Mobicents team will soon count with a couple more friends. If you think you have what is needed please get in touch privately. As usual we will give priority to people which have been participating on our lovely community.

Say hello to Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.2.1.FINAL

2010-11-10T03:51:00.000Z

It's out, check the release announcement, which includes download link.

Mobicents JAIN SLEE at 900 CPS!

2010-11-05T16:54:00.001Z

With respect to SLEE 2.2.1.FINAL testing, I ran the usual single node SIP UAS load test, but this time it was pushed till 900cps. First time ever, there was 2.5M calls at that load without a single call failure, just a few retransmissions, memory was rock solid at 83%, and CPU at 270% (4 Cores), during that time. The test was done in the usual old QA Labs machine, compare it with the load we handled in last 1.2 release, a bit more than 200cps!

The question now is... Will Mobicents SLEE 3.x reach the special 1K? :)

Mobicents SIP Presence Service next steps...

2010-10-27T13:47:00.000+01:00

The market for SIP Presence is quickly turning their heads to RCS, which more or less starts with OMA specs and make them more usable for a real presence network.

Mobicents can't ignore that, as the result we will target RCS compliancy for Mobicents SIP Presence 1.0.0.FINAL, now this could introduce more serious delays to have something concrete released and at the same time we consider it passed way too much time since our last BETA5 release. Many improvements have been committed into the SVN source code base since that release, thus we also have decided to quickly come up with a BETA6 release, addressing OMA 1.1 as much as possible, expected to be released around 6th November, a week after Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.2.1.FINAL.

We will present a more concrete roadmap for CR1 and FINAL releases very very soon.

Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.2.0.FINAL released!

2010-10-11T01:13:00.000+01:00

Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.2.0.FINAL is out, the last major release for 2.x! Please read release announcement and get download link at http://tinyurl.com/2b5jdrs

Mobicents Team Meeting 2010, Antalya - Turkey

2010-10-06T15:17:00.004+01:00

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.

Beautiful resort, specially at night

Resort main pool, it had 5 or 6, one with water slides

That's it, the end, if you are interested in the JAIN SLEE presentation please click here to download.

Bye bye.

Feedback about Mobicents

2010-09-16T23:22:00.000+01:00

The Mobicents team set up a quick survey about the platform, if you are a Mobicents user please participate, it's valuable feedback for us.

Click to read the survey announcement.

More SLEE 1.1 Extensions

2010-09-05T23:41:00.000+01:00

Lately I have been introducing a few extensions to the JAIN SLEE 1.1 standard, first by teasing about Java Annotations (more on this soon) and then promoting the extension of the Resource Adaptor's ConfigProperties concept to SBB and Profile's component types, it is now time to promote a few more extensions, allowing the Mobicents community to be an important playground for SLEE specs innovation too. The newest extensions are:

SbbContextExt - extension of javax.slee.SbbContext interface, exposing methods to retrieve SLEE facilities, factories and RA objects. An API more consistent with the RA API which does not uses JNDI

ProfileContextExt - extension of javax.slee.ProfileContext, exposing a method to retrieve the Alarm Facility, same reasoning as the extension of SbbContext

ActivityContextInterfaceExt - small extension of javax.slee.ActivityContextInterface, allowing the retrieval of the timers and names bound to the ACI

Library References - extension of the Library Jar XML Descriptor, allowing the reference of other component types such as SBBs or RA Types

Read and discuss all about those extensions by clicking here. Any feedback and contribution is welcome.

JAIN SLEE 1.1 Extensions: ConfigProperties

2010-09-03T00:18:00.000+01:00

This should be interesting if you care about the development of the JAIN SLEE specification, it is about extending the JAIN SLEE 1.1 Resource Adaptor API ConfigProperties concept to other component types, namely Services, SBBs and Profile Specifications.

Click here to read the proposal and engage the community discussion.

Summer teaser

2010-08-20T15:15:00.008+01:00

Click here for some tasty code

All descriptor's metadata and service logic in a single class.

Stay tunned, more next week ;-)

Creating XCAP App Usages for Mobicents XDMS

2010-08-18T12:35:00.001+01:00

The process of developing and deploying a XCAP Application Usage in Mobicents XDM Server was enhanced and simplified. ~~In case you're interested on the subject download and read the slides explaining everything.~~ Update: please refer to Mobicents XDM Server documentation, it includes a section on how to create new XCAP App Usages.

Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.1.2.FINAL released

2010-08-11T07:20:00.002+01:00

Lots of fixes and enhancements, check the announcement, includes download link.

Couple of geeks (South African article on Mobicents interventions)

2010-07-06T15:43:00.001+01:00

Cool work done on top of Converged Demo Mobicents example application, read announcement and discuss it.

Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.1.1.GA released

2010-07-03T14:14:00.001+01:00

A new build of Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.1.x is out, download links and the full announcement here.

Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.1.0.GA released

2010-06-16T14:57:00.003+01:00

Lots of enhancements, read announcement at http://groups.google.com/group/mobicents-public/browse_thread/thread/7679c8dba934b532

How would you change JAIN SLEE 1.1

2010-05-20T17:34:00.002+01:00

There is some brainstorming going on at mobicents-public google group, with respect to Sbb configuration means. Click here to read or participate.

Anyway I think we could go beyond the proposed changes and for instance support annotations (as alternative to xml descriptor parts) or replace the usage of JNDI with a richer SbbContext, but I'm really interested in your point of view, so let us know what you don't like in the current revision of JAIN SLEE and how would you fix it.

May I have your attention please

2010-04-26T20:21:00.000+01:00

Hey there, Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.1 is coming fast, and I would like to give you an insight of particular and very important changes on the foundations, which I believe will greatly evolve the container's code and how the community interacts with it, and could otherwise really go unnoticed.

But then, my 3rd anniversary in Red Hat is due in 4 days too, so I will take the opportunity to also talk a bit about JAIN SLEE and Mobicents history or how close we became.

In case you are not *that* familiar with the JAIN SLEE container, and Mobicents JAIN SLEE in particular, sometimes it is defined as - specially by competing specifications :) - as a heavy weight platform, mostly with respect to 2 ideas: it is a lot more than you will ever need, and a bit as a consequence, it is impossible that it keeps up in performance.

The above ideas are both very wrong, lets begin with the first one. SLEE was designed to fulfill the requirements for full feature carrier grade telco apps, and those, if taken serious, will always needs the army of management APIs that SLEE provides and others competing specs don't. It's hard to conceive, if you are responsible for a serious telco app, that you think it is important that the app runtime code follows a spec but then all the management can be proprietary... Sure one can say that now one has JMX and other frameworks, but those are just generic frameworks, it's way too far to bind to the runtime application needs, I would say that one needs to develop more on the management side that on service runtime logic, and that is of course a bad thing. SLEE used to have the muddy and proprietary RA API, but the 1.1 revision nailed it, making it a complete platform spec.

Anyway, I'm not saying the SLEE spec is perfect, no way, in my humble opinion it is far from that... For instance I'm not a big supporter of SLEE profiles, it's a bit like reinventing the wheel, and Java EE has very nice round and shinny ones! Another bad point is the too strong relation with Java transactions, I would prefer something transparent as all Java EE APIs, if you want/need then use it, otherwise skip it, this would be really nice specially when the big majority of external resources use APIs which are not transaction aware, making the recover of a rollback a lot of trouble. Shhhh... it's also very true, then even when it is good to use it, a lot of developers tend to ignore or run away from it, it's scary some say. On top of it add a good mix of abstract components which most people struggle to understand difference of objects and entities and there you go, SLEE API runtime gets ugly and complex... well, at least till you get it after a couple weeks or months, by that time if you're still on SLEE there are high chances that you now are in love with it and try to apply it to everything out there, even if it is nothing more that an hello world, perhaps because it is was such a challenge? Okay, enough enough ;-)

The second argument, SLEE is slower, this one I really don't understand, SLEE is by all means at least at same performance of other specifications, and by the time you start adding extras that you end up needing, such as management parts or data sources/transactions, SLEE is probably way faster than anything out there, and that is simply - on top of the highly efficient async model - because that big platform design/api was fine tuned considering all parts, and there are very high chances that the user will fail to come up with something proprietary that tuned. Right, nothing impossible of course, but how many apps do you known with good performance that don't need a fine profiling and tuning till you end up loosing most of the language high level charm? Doesn't even matter of which spec...

And that's it, my bla bla bla of why SLEE is big, why SLEE is full of features you may not need in your app first release, etc etc, which leads to what really this post is about. Maybe a bit of more preliminaries first? Okay, lets talk about Mobicents history, right someone of you are now awake...

Mobicents open source started right in the middle of the java.net boom, and once JAIN SLEE 1.0 spec was out, a top secret society - including Ivelin Ivanov (now JBoss Commnications / Mobicents platform lead), Ranga (now JAIN SIP API and RI lead), Jean Deruelle (now Mobicents SIP Servlets! lead) and others (it's funny the well known OSS related names you find out in the oldest sources) gather around that new shinny platform, maybe noticing that it could very well be the most wanted piece of telco software in the following years, and knowing that the telco middleware cost was outrageous it was difficult to not succeed...

Well, that didn't came fast, even with very good developers, JAIN SLEE is not an easy platform to implement, it took quite some time to achieve certification, and surprise surprise... after all those years it's still is a 3 vendor world, well 2 if we only consider the certified ones. Others have tried, and with a lot of resources, but eventually gave up, the JAIN SLEE market really struggled to justify that investment too, be it because another spec, more high level took off - Sip Servlets, be it because it was damn hard to understand the API in one week, or even because the serious offers at that time were not that cheap. And this is the world which I got in right after university, but hey I was really really lucky, I was always around good people, first in Portugal Telecom Inovação, and then in Red Hat, and those persons gave me the chance to learn a lot in such short time. What better places to learn both telco related and OSS Java development than those companies, they are fors sure in the top for each "world" :-)

Moving on, I switched to Red Hat/JBoss in the 1st of May 2007 , when the company bought the rights for the Mobicents code and the first year and half was just to make it a product. Like I said the code was complex, many different authors in many different times, we started with SIP performance around 10/15 cps, no kidding. By the time we achieved version 1.2 we were able to come up with around 150 cps, at that time we were getting almost all we could get of it, and was time to kickoff the development of the second generation, targeting the new 1.1 spec revision, which EG I joined late.

Clearly we need to start from its foundations, but we couldn't simply throw away the 1.2 code, too risky and not much time, but even with such constraints the team came up with something like 75% of new code, and it paid off, the 2.0.0.GA born with strong features and performance (well above the 500 cps mark). The "core" code had now new modules to deal with JAIN SLEE components building and management, combining stuff like JAXB or Javassist, or very different code such as the SLEE profiles mapping to JPA, attractive to any open source developer for sure, all the latest and challenging APIs or tools (big bet in JBoss AS5 and Maven2 also) to get dirty, improve skills and why not, get a better job around Mobicents or these technologies, that's what happened to me and all of the Mobicents team, it's that real, open source communities pay off!

Okay, against my believes, the community didn't jumped on board right away, sure it's still too fresh, and there are already some great success stories, but lets clearly say, 90% of the community boards are requests for help, the ones that the team can't fully embrace as one would like, it's not that difficult to understand the why. Now this lack of contributions is a trend in nowadays open source platforms, a lot confuse it with free software with free support, that is not what makes the community evolve. In all my community or sales talks I try to really make a point about the advantages of the open source community, it's such an opportunity to evolve the code and skills (both the user, dev team and work process) in a friendly environment that truly most really don't understand what is the miss when being shy.

But then, there must be a reason for the lack of contributions, and it's the team job to get around it, and spice the community, and in my opinion that can only be done in two aways, either we make a Mobicents Bingo with nice prizes or we make the code, tools and development process more attractive, and yeah - not the bingo ah ah - that's what we will be trying to start with Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.1.

In Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.1, most of those 25% of code in 2.0 that were not new, which were the foundations of the whole platform, and how the modules glued together, will now be completely reworked, targeting an attractive multi module platform, on top of an SPI that overrides the javax.slee interfaces. Sure at first this SPI may not come in the best shape, it's a big effort to extract a big set - hundreds - of interfaces which mean something in a couple of weeks, but we will get there. On those modules, the idea is to make them more and more efficient, both in the SPI and Implementation, have their own configurations (and pluggable) means, for instance different implementations of the event router mapping of thread executors to activity contexts, different datasources to store every kind of instance state, all wrapped and tighten by a great packager named JBoss Microcontainer, making it so easy to replace modules or sub-modules as dropping jars and change XML or JMX properties. In summary, it's the container that you easily personalize to your own needs, whiteout meaning the change to proprietary specification, easily target a single module for your contributions. Yes, I'm that excited with this kind of move.

Okay, I must stop it for now, initial work is now on the svn trunk, documentation on the Core modules and SPI will start popping up in the mobicent public wiki, hopefully by the community users too. Hope you enjoy our work and join efforts to make it better and better, we all win.

Cheers.

Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.0.0.GA Performance

2010-03-17T18:04:00.001Z

Something cool, Luis Barreiro (JBoss QA Labs) just published performance test results for the first GA release of Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.x, and you know what, that old server we have been using, and that at some point was ranking Mobicents JAIN SLEE 1.2.x SIP Call Setup Load Test with results such as 200 cps, is now capable of reaching 750 cps!!! The development of the new JAIN SLEE generation was though and took some additional time, but I really believe our community and customers now have a true carrier grade, certified, open source, telco AS. Enjoy!

Full details about the report here

Mobicents JAIN SLEE Plans

2010-03-09T18:05:00.000Z

Chances are that you are already aware of the announcement I made in mobicents-public google group, but in case you didn't, please read important information regarding the plans for Mobicents JAIN SLEE 1.2.x, the old generation branch, and the next 2.x releases.

Click here.

Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.0.0.GA unleashed!

2010-02-25T15:36:00.000Z

Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.0.0.GA is released, see detailed announcement at http://groups.google.com/group/mobicents-public/t/8a560b2ee30d4261

Mobile World Congress 2010 at Barcelona

2010-01-28T11:51:00.008Z

I will be 2 days in the Red Hat boot, 16 and 17, showing demos and giving all details on the current Mobicents platform and its future. If you are attending the premier telco event please come by and say hello.

It's out! It's out!

2010-01-27T23:10:00.001Z

Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.0.0.CR1 is released, full release announcement at http://groups.google.com/group/mobicents-public/t/aab870d283c9483

Happy New Year 2010

2009-12-31T18:08:00.004Z

2009 was a great year but 2010 will be amazing, happy new year! That's all folks, off for the celebrations :-)

Vroom Vroom

2009-11-25T15:49:00.002Z

Luis Barreiro, from JBoss QA Labs, just posted a report for a first short (1 million) SIP call setup load test with Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.0.0.BETA2. I'm pretty sure that, for a single and not fancy small server, 450 new CPS and less than 50ms of average latency is a damn good improvement, after all, it's just two times faster than 2.0.0.BETA1, which was already about 20% faster than 1.2.6.GA, and latency is one third of 2.0.0.BETA1's 150ms.

By the way, there are still improvements to do till 2.0.0.GA ;-)

Click here to see original post and reports.

Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.0.0.BETA2 Released!

2009-11-19T09:56:00.001Z

It's faster than ever, and it brings clustering to the game, the second beta of next gen Mobicents JAIN SLEE is out.

Download it from Sourceforge.

Read the full release announcement.

Time to change your OS?

2009-10-07T16:52:00.002+01:00

UNIX mixed with an easy to use UI, in a well controlled hardware environment, I must say I'm a Apple OSX fan since day 1 after change (well not quite, the Apple keyboard scheme was hard to digest)!

Now when Snow Leopard was announced with zero new features, I said to myself that an upgrade was not really a must, but since I'm fan of it how could I not do it?!?

And the upgrade was made, and with that came the "JDK6 only" world for Java, not surprising since JDK5 EOL is near. What really surprised me was the performance, simply amazing, see the screenshot below of a standalone JAIN SIP Reference Implementation application load test for a simple call setup, terminated at application side after 60s, running at 450 CPS in a 2 and half year old Macbook Pro laptop.

Wow! Is it time to change/upgrade your OS? :-)

Web Presentation - JAIN SLEE 1.1 Resource Adaptor API and Migration to Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.0

2009-09-16T11:28:00.003+01:00

Hello there, next wednesday (23 September 2009) at 2pm UTC (Lisbon/London timezone), I will be doing a web presentation regarding the JAIN SLEE 1.1 Resource Adaptor API and the migration to Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.0 using Elluminate. The double session target JAIN SLEE RA developers and should last 1 hour.

The guest link for the session is https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=819&password=M.11157CBC38CD4E1D764384B0BACDF4

I recommend people to join 10 minutes before the session start to understand and get familiar with Elluminate features.

This is not mandatory, but if you are going to participate, please let me know by email (emmartins at gmail.com). By the way, if you are interested in the slides please requested them at same time.

See you there!

JAIN-SLEE 1.1 Certification

2009-09-01T20:15:00.006+01:00

In "blog" terms, it is officially official, Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.0.0.BETA1 is certified for JAIN SLEE 1.1 specs, being the first one besides the specs leader, and single one which is open source.

TCK Report can be downloaded here.

August 2009, Brno Czech Republic

2009-09-01T19:08:00.005+01:00

Last week the Red Hat Mobicents core team had a face to face meeting to review 2009 and define the plans for 2010, and uhh... have some fun also ;)

I made a few presentations related with JAIN SLEE and SIP Presence Service projects, you can look at the slides here and here. Briefly the roadmaps were updated and represent another aggressive turn, JAIN SLEE 2.x is now under heavy core optimization and cluster is the magic word, while SIP Presence finally sees a concrete plan towards a GA release.

Mobicents Platform wide, the plans for High Availability and Fault Tolerance are ambitious, with a cooperative work between JAIN SLEE and Sip Servlets teams, and there will be a strong effort by the team to also greatly improve JAIN SIP reference implementation.

Also, Mobicents Media Server team has really done a fine job into creating a great open source java media server, and the SS7 connectors roadmap for it (and also for a set of related JAIN SLEE resource adaptors) really got my attention. Cheers to all involved.

Of course, I would not finish the post without some fun time photos, after all we had soccer, karts, great dinners, awesome night parties... Look for yourself!!

Warming up for the karts, Mobicents Sip Servlets Lead Jean Deruelle and me, with awesome looking cheap fake hair

Here we go vroomm vroomm

One hell of a dinner, all the team members present at the meeting, except the great host - Pavel.
Left to right: Jean, Ivelin, Amit, Luis, Bartosz, Vladimir, Alex and me

Then calming down with a glass of Chardonnay

And the end ;)

Congratulations to the whole team for such a fantastic meeting, and to Brno city for being so kind

Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.0.0.BETA1

2009-08-07T15:47:00.003+01:00

The loooooooooong waited first BETA version of Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.x is out!!!! JBoss AS 5, JAIN SLEE 1.1, better performance, it all there already. See the official release announcement.

Since the container now supports JAIN SLEE 1.1, the old scheme to include library jars in deployable units is not supported, instead you should create JAIN SLEE library jars, and too make it easier we developed a new Maven2 plugin, where, putting it simple, you just configure the library id, put classes/resources in usual places, define jars to be include as default scoped dependencies. You can even define references to other libraries using dependencies with runtime scope, and the plugin will grab the library id of the referenced library automatically. Needless to say, the plugin generates the library-jar.xml XML descriptor for you and makes the jar, cool uh? :) A complete wiki page about the plugin is on the works, but you can take a look at one example here.

The maven DU plugin was also updated to 2.0.0.BETA1, defining own packaging "jainslee-du", being faster on the build process, and generating JAIN SLEE 1.1 XML descriptors. The plugin now deploys DU jars into Maven repositories, which open new possibilities for a remote DU management, kind of a SLEE online component store. See an example using new version of this plugin.

On a side note, for this BETA version of the container, people used to deploy/undeploy deployable units through file copy, what we call hard deploy, need to include a jboss-classloading.xml file in the deployable unit META-INF such as this one. This is due to some incompatibilities in class loading of the underlying JBoss AS5 Microcontainer deployers.

See you soon for some posts about JAIN SLEE 1.1 new features.

PS: Next version, BETA2, will bring Fault Tolerance and new management console, scheduled to September of this year, hooraay ;)

Long time uh?!

2009-07-17T10:00:00.003+01:00

That is correct, unfortunately last months it has been difficult to find time to post something interesting, but will soon change with the release of the first beta version of Mobicents JAIN SLEE version 2, you can expect thoughts about JAIN SLEE 1.1 specs (some may be quite controversial) and other new features, such as the usage of JBoss AS5 or High Availability/ Fault Tolerance, be patient :-)

Meanwhile a new version of Mobicents SIP Presence Service is out, BETA5, which is always a little bit emotional, and mainly introduces mandatory authentication and authorization in the public XCAP interface of the XDM Server, and a better Resource List Server. More info at http://groups.google.com/group/mobicents-public/t/3b5454c49bbba13b

Mobicents JAIN SLEE was also upgraded to 1.2.6.GA, which includes serialized access to sbb entities, a better fit with the specs. See it at http://groups.google.com/group/mobicents-public/browse_thread/thread/2b1170b08c8e6ccf#

Mobicents JAIN-SLEE Server 1.2.0.GA released!

2008-10-03T03:02:00.005+01:00

Hooray, the long-waited stable 1.2 release of Mobicents JAIN-SLEE Server is finally available. Check out the details of this fine release here.

Custom XCAP Application Usages on Mobicents XDMS

2008-10-01T11:43:00.003+01:00

In case you want to learn about XCAP Application Usages and how those are implemented in Mobicents XDM Server, so you can add a custom one, or contribute with a standard one not available (such as poc), please have a look at this slides.

2008-10-01T11:35:00.003+01:00

The Mobicents team met in Munich, Germany to plan 2009 and have some fun. You can download the presentations I made, regarding the features & development plan for Mobicents JAIN SLEE Server 2.x and an introduction to the SIP Presence Service, which explains why you should go for it. Additional presentations can be found here.

Me and Jean Deruelle, Mobicents JAIN SLEE & SIP Servlets Interoperability in late meeting!

2008-08-29T18:24:00.003+01:00

Mobicents JAIN-SLEE Server 1.2.0.CR2 released!

This release improves 1.2.0.CR1 stability with a few fixes on the JAIN
SLEE core and examples. Here is the list of issues fixed.

This release also provides a new version of an old but useful example,
the SIP Wake Up Service.

What is included:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Core JAIN SLEE Server
* Management Console
* Resource adaptors: SIP RA, SIP11 RA (complaint with JAIN SLEE 1.1
specs), JCC RA, XMPP RA, SMPP RA, HTTP Client RA, HTTP Servlet RA,
Asterisk RA, Text to Speech RA, Rules RA, Diameter Base RA
* Educational examples: Google Talk Bot, SIP Services, SIP Wake Up
* Sources zip for debug purposes

Where to download from?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The distribution can be found on SourceForge.

More info here.

2008-08-14T00:57:00.002+01:00

Mobicents SIP Presence Service 1.0.0.BETA2 has been released. This release is the first binary publicly available! More info here. Enjoy!

2008-08-13T16:41:00.003+01:00

Mobicents JAIN SLEE Server 1.2.0.CR1 has been released. This release is the first candidate for the 1.2.0 GA and hopefully will be the last. More info here.

2008-06-10T14:16:00.002+01:00

NOTE: This tutorial is now deprecated, since it doesn't work with current Mobicents JAIN SLEE platform, but the good news is that I made a new improved one, go for it.

A JAIN SLEE beginner's tutorial? That's a question I see frequently in Mobicents forums, and so I decided to write one that examples how to use Mobicents JAIN-SLEE Server and the last tools we made around Apache Maven2. You can call it "Developing a Hello World JAIN SLEE service in 30 minutes or less".
Of course, before we need a working environment, so you need to install Mobicents JAIN SLEE server binary (don't forget to add an environment variable JBOSS_HOME pointing to the jboss-4.2.2.GA directory of the Mobicents install), and for this tutorial you will also need the Eclipse IDE and Apache Maven2. Additionally you will need to setup Mobicents JAIN SLEE Maven Archetypes. Click on the links for instructions on how to do that.
Ready to rumble? Lets start by creating the Maven2 project using Mobicents JAIN SLEE Maven Archetypes.
Part 1 - Creating the Maven2 project
Open a bash/terminal/command line in the Eclipse workspace directory and type
mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeCatalog=local
The Maven2 Archetype plugin will ask you what archetype you want to use, introduce the number for jain-slee-basic-service. Second it will ask you the values for some properties:

groupId - introduce org.mobicents.slee.example
artifactId - introduce hello-world
version - just press enter to accept default value
package - introduce org.mobicents.slee.example again

After defining those properties the plugin will ask you to confirm it, introduce y.
The process will finally build the project, which will be a directory named hello-world.
Part 2 - Create the Eclipse project and import it in the Eclipse workspace
Ensure Eclipse is closed, and in the bash/terminal/command line (Eclipse's workspace directory) do
mvn -Declipse.workspace=. eclipse:add-maven-repo
Maven will add a variable M2_REPO to Eclipse pointing to Maven2 local repository. Now change to hello-world directory and do
mvn mobicents:eclipse
Maven will create the Eclipse project files. Finally open Eclipse, in the File menu select Import, then "General->Existing Projects into Workspace", next and finally browse to the hello-world directory and Eclipse should find a project named ... hello-world, select it and press Finish.
Part 3 - JAIN SLEE coding
Lets start with a short overview of JAIN SLEE. A SLEE is an application server, a container for software components. JAIN SLEE is designed and optimized for event driven applications, also known as asynchronous applications.
A JAIN SLEE event represents an occurrence that requires application processing. Each event has a specified event type (name,vendor and version), and all applications define the event types they want to handle, on the application Xml descriptors. For each event type of interest an event handler method must be provided in the application.
Events occur in a resource, inside or outside of the container. We call "event firing" to the action of posting of an event into the container, and when this happens the container will route the event to all applications interested on it, that is, all application instances (entities) attached to the context of that event, in JAIN SLEE this context is named activity. This attachment can be explicit (lets leave that for another article) or implicit, when the application defines the event type of the event being routed as an initial event. This means that if an application defines an event type as "initial", then all events of that type will be handled by the application.
So JAIN SLEE applications, also known as Services, are pure logic, which is executed by the container when events are fired in the container, which means they don’t have any active resources. In that sense, a JAIN SLEE service is no different than a web page script executed by the browser.
Going deeper, a JAIN SLEE Service is a tree of Service Building Blocks (Sbb), containing one root Sbb which then can declare others as child Sbbs, which then can have their own childs, and so on. Each Sbb is a Java abstract class, and includes the following logic:

implementation of the event handler methods
implementation of the interface to be used by other Sbbs who declare it as a child
implementation of an entity/instance life-cyle
implementation of methods to manage persistence of instance data

A well designed JAIN SLEE application only has one initial event, since each event of that type creates a new logical and independent instance of the application.
Ok, now what we want for our service is that when it is activated a message "Hello World" will be printed on the console. The Maven archetype we used already made most of the job:

it created a Service, which is nothing more than a Xml descriptor, that you can find in du/src/main/resources/services/service.xml, that just defines it's id (name,vendor,version) and its root sbb:

<service-name>hello-world SLEE Service</service-name>
<service-vendor>org.mobicents.slee.example</service-vendor>
<service-version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</service-version>
<root-sbb>
<description>
<sbb-name>hello-world SBB</sbb-name>
<sbb-vendor>org.mobicents.slee.example</sbb-vendor>
<sbb-version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</sbb-version>
</description>
</root-sbb>
...

it created a Sbb that handles an internal event, ServiceStartedEvent, that is fired whenever a service is activated. How is this done you may ask, each Sbb class is packed in jar with a Xml descriptor (you can open it in eclipse please? sbb/src/main/resources/META-INF/sbb-jar.xml), this descriptor defines the Sbb id (name,vendor,version), its Java class and the events it handles, in this case ServiceStartedEvent:

<sbb-name>hello-world SBB</sbb-name>
<sbb-vendor>org.mobicents.slee.example</sbb-vendor>
<sbb-version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</sbb-version>

<sbb-classes>
<sbb-abstract-class reentrant="False">      
<sbb-abstract-class-name>
org.mobicents.slee.example.RootSbb
</sbb-abstract-class-name>            
</sbb-abstract-class> 
</sbb-classes> 

<event direction="Receive" event="True">
<event-name>ServiceStartedEvent</event-name>
<event-type-ref>
<event-type-name>
javax.slee.serviceactivity.ServiceStartedEvent
</event-type-name>
<event-type-vendor>javax.slee</event-type-vendor>
<event-type-version>1.0</event-type-version>
</event-type-ref>
<initial-event-select variable="ActivityContext" />
</event>

The Sbb class itself you can open it in the source package of the eclipse project, with the name RootSbb, which includes the ServiceStartedEvent event handler:

public void onServiceStartedEvent(
javax.slee.serviceactivity.ServiceStartedEvent event,
ActivityContextInterface aci) {

try {
Context myEnv = (Context) new InitialContext().lookup("java:comp/env");
ServiceActivity sa = ((ServiceActivityFactory) myEnv
.lookup("slee/serviceactivity/factory")).getActivity();
if (sa.equals(aci.getActivity())) {
// it's this service that is starting
logger.info("service activated...");
}  
// don't want to receive further events on this activity
aci.detach(this.sbbContext.getSbbLocalObject());

} catch (Exception e) {
logger.error("Can't handle service started event.", e);
}
}

The logic in this event handler looks ugly but it's simple, it retrieves the ServiceActivity of the service from it's JNDI environment, and compares it with the ServiceActivity where the event was fired. If matches it means it's our service that is being activated. Great, now we just need to print the message in the console and in fact it's already printing something, "service activated", so all you need to do is change that code to

logger.info("hello world!!!");

Part 4 - Run the service
The end is close, let's start Mobicents JAIN SLEE Server, doing run.sh/run in server/bin folder of the Mobicents directory. Use another bash/terminal/command line window please.
Once it stops go to the window in the hello-world example directory and do
mvn install
Voila, Maven builds the Service's Deployable Unit jar on it's own, copies it to the Mobicents server deploy dir, and you should see the service being deployed on the window where Mobicents is running. In the end you should see
03:04:44,697 INFO [RootSbb] hello world!!!
That's it, have fun with JAIN SLEE specification document (the best knowledge source for sure) and don't forget to leave your feedback here.

2008-02-18T15:18:00.005Z

Last week I attended JBoss World 2008 at Orlando, the biggest JBoss event ever, with around 750 attendees not working for JBoss/Red Hat.

One of the most interesting things I noticed, is that there is huge market of J2EE developers that can really make a difference with JBoss solutions, by leveraging Mobicents projects into their web applications.

We made a demo of a converged web 2.0 application using JBoss Seam and Mobicents (and much more actually) for a furniture store, that would call site users and admins according to order details, for order auth, confirmation, etc and the reaction was a big big "wow". Attendees left the room with the idea something must be changing.

It's a new world for them, using more than a browser to interact with users, and it's a new world for us, who have been targeting primarily the telco market.

The only not so good thing was the size of the audience for this demo, but the presentation title was somehow misleading and it was at 10h am after JBoss World party! Anyway, we will evolve this demo and for sure present it in more J2EE big events along the year.

Photo of the Mobicents team members present at JBW, left to right: Alexandre Mendonça (R&D), Vladimir Ralev (R&D), Bartosz Baranowski (R&D), Luis Barreiro (QA), me (R&D), Amit Bhayani (R&D), Jean Deruelle (R&D)

2007-10-31T17:07:00.001Z

Who knows, someday I may write something here...