Last post on this blog, my new blog can be found HERE.
I will keep this one running due to the old posts content.

New Hat

I'm now officially a member of the JBoss Application Server core development team, my blog will now become more personal, and switch focus to the matters of my main activity. I created a new blog for the Mobicents SLEE project, please follow it ;-)

Say hello to RAY

Mobicents SLEE 2.7.0.FINAL, codenamed RAY, is now available for download, check the release announcement, as usual there are lots of goodies included :-)  

Microsoft on{x}

Microsoft does an Android app, named on{x}, which requires Facebook login... perhaps the world truly ends in 2012!


Now with respect to the app/framework, very cool concept for development of service logic "recipes", check it out.

Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.6.0.FINAL released

The Mobicents team is glad to announce that Mobicents JAIN-SLEE 2.6.0.FINAL, codenamed GANDHI, is now available for download.

Is it the best and strongest SLEE release ever? Probably, click here to read the full release announcement.

The Future of Mobicents, from Sunset to Sunrise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hello, FINAL versions of the SLEE Maven Plugins released:

• Maven DU Plugin 2.0.0.FINAL
• Maven Library Plugin 1.0.0.FINAL

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

Custom JBoss AS Deployment Ordering

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!

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!!!

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

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:

• Diameter Base RA Library
• Diameter Sh Client RA Library (refers the one above)
• SIP UAS Example DU

Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.3.0.FINAL released!

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

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