Restcomm

Many Mobicents community users are already familiar with IPBX, which is complete (and open-source) Media PBX with rich Web User Interface, but it's been on the background for some time due to higher priority tasks. Now with the increased community ... [More] feedback, we present the new version of IPBX 1.0 CR, which is stable and covers a number of real use-cases. I cannot not mention the guys from Manaty for their help testing the IPBX and finding/solving a number of problems. But I want to thank all users who gave feedback and reported their experiences.For those who are new to IPBX - this is a converged application (meaning it serves several protocols HTTP, SIP, Media/RTP) and as such it provides integrated experience acrosss several technologies. Let's see this short video of what the application really does:What we see here is users authenticating against the application over HTTP and SIP protocols from Web browsers and SIP Phones respectively. They use the same credentials for both HTTP and SIP, the sessions are related to each other by the users and the state of the calls can be displayed in the Web browser of particular users. Moreover, when users call each-other they participate in the same calls, thus many users may want to see the state of the same call or conference bridge - the IPBX provides that as well.Once you are in a call, you can invite more people in a conference, or you can remove participants. When you need to type something, use the conference chat. All participants in the conference will see the messages. The video also shows a function known as call parking, which allows you to transfer a call from one phone to another.There are many things not shown in this video. When you are getting started you should take a look at the administrative panels (log in as admin/admin). Three important features there:PSTN Accounts - allows you to call PSTN phones such as mobile and landline phones through a PSTN gateway service providerPBX Settings - allows you to configure the PBX behaviour, the system announcement files, calling prefix, etcUser Administration - you can edit the user accounts from hereIt is important to note that once configured, the PBX can operate without any Web User Interface. If you like you can register your phones blindly and start making calls by dialing peers or PSTN numbers (with the prefix). The SIP and Web parts of the application, although implemented by the same application logic can operate independently and still catch-up with each other if you want to log in from the Web UI.On the technical side, this application was implemented on top of Mobicents Sip Servlets 1.0 for JBoss AS 4.2.3, Seam Telco Framework 2.2, JBoss Seam and Richfaces with JBoss Developer Studio and Mobicents Eclipse Plugins.I really hope this project to gain more developer community interest to help us build the next features on the roadmap. Right now the following features are planned for the near future:Recording callsBetter UIVoicemailMultiline callsThere are certainly a lot of other features we'd like to add, and if you have other ideas they are more than welcome.There are few other videos, but I will just add this one for the Linux users with another set of phones: Finally, some links:Download - the war and the xml files must be deployed on Mobicents Sip Servlets 1.0 JBoss 4.2.3, which can be downloaded from here.Source CodeIPBX Project HomepageMobicents HomepageEnjoy! [Less]

Last week, I visited OKI, a major japanese telecom product vendor, to help creating a better technical relationship for the telecom vertical between OKI and Red Hat JBCP team. Along with our technical meetings I got to see one of their new products ... [More] in action.It's no secret that Japan is way ahead in many IT&Telecom fields. New things are developed fast and pushed to the market quickly. As a result, the people I see on the streets are almost always "on the phone" - looking the the screen, pressing some buttons or waving the phone around. I quickly learned that the phones usually come with tons of apps and services that make you stick around such as built-in contact-less e-wallets chips, bar-code readers, TV (the Japanese TV is crazy!) and what not. I don't even mention the browsers and all the internet/IP services here. You can walk through the subway doors with the phone in your hand and the ticketing transactions occur automatically. You can scan some QR code to pick up information about items in the store, on the street or elsewhere.Obviously, when you create a new service here, you can leverage a lot of unique infrastructure, but the Japanese market is massive and very saturated and staying on top is a real challenge.The new product from OKI is up for the challenge. It is an advanced platform for a variety of services delivered in a unique integrated and rich user interface. Basically you call a number, it turns out the service you dialed supports streaming the enhanced user interface and your phone picks it up. Your TV, PC or other devices at home can join the service session and show you visually the current menus in the service or the results of your operations. The feedback from the system is both audio and video updated accurately in real time on all devices in the session. With your voice you can navigate through the menus or ask operations to be executed. You could use DTMF to enter a password or a code privately in case you don't want to speak out confidential information to feed the system. One of the coolest features is that if you are not at home, you could use some nearby ATM or other kiosk in Japan as a display. So, you are walking on the street and you just literally tell your phone to move the visualization to the kiosk and it's there. Additionally, kiosk and other devices may have more UI controls such as touchscreen, keyboard or a mouse. Within your service session you can use the extra controls for input. The OKI team allowed me to blog about this omitting some details and features. They put a lot of attention to details in the UI and interop interfaces, and some are really worth keeping secret :)One of the example services implemented on top of the platform is ordering food for a family. You go through the usual steps - identifying yourself, searching for a particular type of food, selecting a restaurant, going through the menu, examine additional options, ask questions, make your order and then confirm the payment. On every step of the order the platform adds something unique to the UI that couldn't be done otherwise especially when it comes to ordering for a group of people or while on the go.I think along with the typical customer services this platform can be useful for a number of office or enterprise applications - collaboration tools, e-meeting tools, online business workflow and so forth.This is just one of the mind-blowing things I've seen in Japan, which is truly a very special place on Earth in every aspect. I will try to cover more "Only in Japan" stories when I catch up with my regular job. [Less]

It happened. In 1.X branch we dropped console for some reasons (many discussion, outcome the same). During last MMS chat Oleg spoke words we believed noone will witnes him say: "Maybe its time for..."Well thats the background. To make it short. We ... [More] would like to announce that MMS 2.X will have management console. How it will look like? It all depends on feedback we get from users. We have general idea, but feedback and ideas are mostly welcome.Design Wiki can be found here , public thread can be found here. [Less]

It's with intense pleasure that I forward here the news of our new aggregated release : Mobicents ALL 1.2.1.GA !It's truly the most complete all integrated Platform out there (and it's open source !) for building next generation Telco and Convergent ... [More] Applications. Nothing less nothing more. Usually vendors have one or two of the components we provide, but no one so far is able to offer all that we provide in Mobicents to your great pleasure...Miscellaneous examples are :Location based services : when ever friends, family is in 2kms range from you, your phone beepsSMS based services : Vote for your Favorite Reality TV ShowIVR (Interactive Voice Response) Based Service : Check your bank account balance through the phoneRing Back ToneEvent Notification by Phone, SMS and IM : get a phone call to set the delivery date of your order or SMS every time your order changed of status (processing, payment confirmed, shipping)Conferencing : The Conference is integrated with your calendar and is calling you and the participants when it's time, no hassle on remembering the number to call, pin code, ... See IT System Monitoring : every time an alert is sent by the monitoring app, your converged application send an SMS, Instant Message, tweet or calls out the IT System team to take preventive actions (Press 1 to restart the server, press 2 to redeploy the application, or whatever)Web Integration for Convergence : Add a small widget so that the customer can be put in contact with the call center (through phone or chat) to help him get more information on the products he wants to buy.Banking : Stock Monitoring application that sends an SMS or calls you when the stock price goes over a user defined threshold and let you press the amount of options you want to sell or buyCustomer Relationship Management : Ability to automatically answer status for support cases or record new leads, integration with leading online CRM providers PBX : Enabling businesses to use their managed intranet to help reduce long distance expenses, enjoy the benefits of a single network for voice and data. Example : Mobicents IPBXThe Sky is the Limit !To build all those kind of applications and more, the following components provided in the Mobicents ALL release will do the job and should cover all your needs :Sip Servlets Container 1.0.GA : Aimed at building VoIP (SIP + Media interaction) and Converged Applications (SIP + HTTP/Java EE + Media interaction) with full HA capabilitiesMedia Server 1.0.3.GA : competitive, complete, best-of-breed media gateway functionality featuring highest quality with following features : Announcement, IVR, Conferencing, Packet Relay and supporting all majors audio codecs and can be controlled remotely through MGCP or in VMJAIN SLEE Container 1.2.6.GA : Aimed at Telco and supporting multi protocols architectures in a standard and highly efficient way. Comes with following Resource Adaptors : SIP, SIP11 (JSR240 a.k.a. JAIN SLEE 1.1), Media, MGCP, JCC, XMPP, SMPP, HTTP Client, HTTP Servlet, Asterisk, Text to Speech, Rules, Diameter (Base, Cca, Rf, Ro, Sh-Client and Sh-Server), XCAP ClientMobicents Diameter 1.0.1.GA : Provides Authentication, Authorization and Accounting capabilitiesMobicents SIP Presence Service 1.0.0.BETA5 : The Mobicents SIP Presence Service provides presence functionalities to SIP-based networksMobicents SIP Load Balancer 1.0.0.BETA7 : provides Load Balancing and failover SIP capabilites for Mobicents servers in a clustered environmentIf you want to get started, download the binary form SourceForge and read the release notes. We are waiting for your feedback on mobicents-public google group.Have fun ! [Less]

The Mobicents team is happy to announce a new release of the mobicents-all bundle, that includes an updated version of most of mobicents components. The last release, mobicents-all-1.2.0.GA, was made in February, so it was about time to update ... [More] it.There aren't many new and exciting features, these are still being developed and can be tried out in the latest beta releases of the different projects. Still, there are new diameter RAs (CCA, Rf, Ro, Sh-server) and the popular diameter-OpenIMS example is also included. The updated versions include several bug fixes and some performance improvements as well. Documentation is included and is more extent than in the previous version.The main product versions are the following:Mobicents JAIN-SLEE 1.2.6.GAMobicents SIP Servlets 1.0Mobicents SIP Presence Service 1.0.0.BETA5Mobicents Media Server 1.0.3.GAMobicents Diameter v1.0.1.GAMobicents SIP Load Balancer 1.0.BETA7So go ahead, download the binary form SourceForge and read the release notes. We are waiting for your feedback on mobicents-public google group.Have fun, [Less]

We are happy to announce the first version 1.0.0.BETA1 of Mobicents RTSP stack. Mobicents RTSP which is built on top of Netty 3.0.1.GA uses the NIO Socket (TCP). The stack doesn't have any state machine and is neutral to be used either at RTSP Client ... [More] side or RTSP Server side. The main purpose to have RTSP Stack is to provide RTSP Support for Mobicents Media Server.As of now only TCP is supported.Binary (including src) is available athttps://sourceforge.net/projects/mobicents/files/Mobicents%20RTSP/SVN taghttp://mobicents.googlecode.com/svn/tags/servers/media/2.x.y/rtsp/mobicents-rtsp-1.0.0.BETA1Look at example codeFor Client Sidehttp://mobicents.googlecode.com/svn/tags/servers/media/2.x.y/rtsp/mobicents-rtsp-1.0.0.BETA1/src/main/java/org/mobicents/rtsp/example/Client.javaFor Server Sidehttp://mobicents.googlecode.com/svn/tags/servers/media/2.x.y/rtsp/mobicents-rtsp-1.0.0.BETA1/src/main/java/org/mobicents/rtsp/example/Server.javaThese are just for understanding on how to initialize the stack.Any feedback please divert http://groups.google.com/group/mobicents-public/topicsEnjoy the RTSP :)Mobicents Media Server Team. [Less]

In mobicents projects we have different EE:SLEEMSS. . . (maybe more)In addition we also have Media Server. Media Server is only responsible for media part of applications. To make it short: regardless of application logic, signaling protocol utilized ... [More] by application, media server role is always the same, to  process media.EE is driven by some sort of protocol chosen by development team - which has complete freedom to choose one protocol over another, restricted only by project requirements. In case of media server it is not that easy. Over time different "parties" created different control protocols for media server (media gateway).For instance with CISCO equipment media server is controled with MGCP, in IMS environment media server is controled with H.248, in WWW it can be controled with RTSP, etc, etc.In Mobicents Media Server 1.x.y we support only MGCP (aside of local MSC API), however we felt that this is not enough to meet demand from partners and community (more on this here).So for MMS 2.x we have more in plans:RTSPH.248MSMLVXMLDuring Brno we were supposed to iterate over this short list, high light use  cases, differences and basic concepts. However we did not have enough time. So in order to compensate I decided to post it here.Here we go.Media Server Operation ModelAs mentioned above media servers follow certain model of operation. See image below: Media Server estabilishes only RTP stream exchanged between UAs. To setup streaming application makes use of some dedicated control protocol. Dedicated controler on Media Server side converts control protocol reqeusts into physical setup of underlying resources(generators,detectors, codecs, etc....). This happens regardles of signaling protocol used(on image it is SIP, but in reality it could be any suitable for application).MSML: Media Server Markup LanguageBasic inforamtion:XML BasedIt is independent of transport protocol ( SIP, HTTP, IP, ...)Follows simple request/response modelSupports transactionsSupports semi-recovery from errorsRequires resource reservationRTP service orientedMSML supports something similar to transaction on Media Server side. It is not strictly defined as transaction but has very similar semantic/behaviour. Each MSML request can be seen as set of actions. Each action has arbitrary ID, set by application developer.  If particular action fails, error response will contain this ID to make application aware of failure point - this is semi-recovery of error condition. MSML pinpoint exact place of failure, allowing application to free resources (yes, responsibility is pushed to application). This is required since Media Server does not reclaim them (according to MSML specs).MSML is also RTP service oriented. Protocol does not define endpoint types as MGCP does for instance. It only defines actions that need to be undertaken to produce stream/interaction with user stream.As protocol MSML is designed to be extensible, just as Diameter does. Functional elements are grouped into package. Each package defines set of primitives which affect Media Server. Prmitives are tags and their parameters which are intepreted by Media Server controler.MSML allows new packages to be defined along ability to extend already defined. This is how whole language structure is defined. Definition from RFC are grouped as follows:CoreDialog-CoreConf-CoreAudit-CoreDialog-Core defines primitives to control automated actions of Media Server, it defines also subpackages to extend those capabilities:Dialog-BaseDialog-TransformDialog-Speech..... MSML: Base abstractionBase MSML abstraction defines functional elements which are aligned as in image below:conn - connection is logical unit which termiantes all RTP sessions from one UAoperator - logical unit representing DSPdialog - set of automated actions like: play, DTMF generator/detector, etc...conf - logical unit which mixes streamsMSML: Protocol use example Below is use case of MSML encapsulated in SIP protocol.MSML used inside SIP requires usually dialog to be established between application server and media server. MSML Requests/Answers are embeded in SIP INFO/INFO OK message.  In image above there is only one UA, which awaits video to be played. However for different number of UAS scheme is similar - only difference is dialog time when dialog is estabilished between app server and media server.In example scenario app server asks Media Server to play announcement like (this is MSML Dialog): "Press one to play movie XXXXX, Press two to play movie xXXYYx" and detect DTMFs. Once UA sends DTMF, Media Server sends DTMF embeded in SIP INFO back to application server and indication that MSML Dialog has ended. Application server decodes INFO, picks file to be streamed back to UA and starts new MSML Dialog: "Play Movie Dialog".Other protocols will follow in subsequent posts. [Less]

This time of the year again all the developers interested in this event came to Brno to gather together to have a fun on the developer conference. The conference took place at the Masaryk University at Brno. On the following link is the full agenda ... [More] including the presso for the Mobicents presentation, what I was involved at.Developer confernce pagesThe agenda was full of the very interesting topics from Jboss topics like Jopr, jboss.org, Drools, Jbpm to Fedora topics like KDE, core utils etc. Of course for me was the most interesting one the Mobicents presentation, which took place at the first day of the conference as the First one (from 9:30 am). I can honestly say, that I was a bit nervous since this was the first time I have presented in the university presentation hall. The attendance however did not exceed the expectations. Finally about 30 people were attending Mobicents presentation and some of them were the outside people , I mean non Redhatter's. What I have mainly focused on, was trying a bit evangelize about Mobicents. The basic assumption was that the target audience is not aware of Mobicents at all. So, I have generally introduced Mobicents follwoed by the other Mobicents modules overview (JAIN Slee, Sip Servlets, Media, Presence, Diameter). The presentation went quite OK and I hope that the attendees did get any idea, what we are doing in Mobicents team.Other presentations, were also quite impressive. Especialy at the second day I would like to pick the jBPM presented by Jiri Pechanec the Red Hat QA Supervisor and the Drools presentation done by Lukas Petrovicky the Red Hat QA Associate. They both made a very interesting stuff.Now we are in the middle of the second day and in the evening I am going to attend the Lab for the Portlet creation and then the Lab for the Jopr plugin (I hope I can easily create my own Jopr plugin as well).After the developer conference presentations, there is going to be the pub event, which is also very expected.Overall the developer conference is quite amazing experience for the developers to join. Is is a good time to stop a bit from the rush days, every day drill and to meet the others and see, what their projects are and what they are working on.+1 [Less]

I'm back from JBoss World 2009 that took place in Chicago together with the RH summit and the event was again awesome this year !First I have to admit that the weather in Chicago was perfect and it helped raise this city as one of the best I've been ... [More] so far in the US : very good public transportation, great architecture, LOTS of cultural events, plenty of parks, beaches on the lakes, ...Tuesday was kind of pre-Jboss World day, it was mainly registration and partner pavillion opening. Me & Vladimir were tending the booth with other JBoss people and checking the partners out.We got to meet and finally put a face on a lot of JBoss colleagues and people from our community (I won't cite any company names, but they will recognize themselves :-) ) getting at the same time great feedback on Mobicents/JBCP and evangelizing.On the next day, we had a great keynote from our CEO, Jim Whitehurst, here is a phrase I thought I'd never hear in a CEO's keynote : "if we all had to walk around naked, we'd all spend more time at the gym" which seems to define the open-source spirit pretty well to me :-)Wednesday, I attended Bela Ban's talk on Large clusters which was really interesting and I would recommend everyone interested in HA to check it out.I got to talk to the Jopr (JBoss ON is the corresponding product) team and we got this idea of integrating Mobicents to send text messages or call phones with DTMF recognition whenever there is some alerts in the cluster so that the IT monitoring team using Jopr can take some action whenever there is a problem. A proof of concept should be available soon :-)Then Vladimir had it's BOF on Rapid VoIP Development Environment - SIP Servlets 1.1 (JSR-289), SEAM Telco Framework, Ruby on Rails, Eclipse VoIP ToolingUnfortunately, we were competing against another BOF about Seam & JSR-299 containing all the JBoss Rock stars : Dan Allen, Pete Muir, Gavin King, Emmanuel Bernard, Max Rydahl Andersen and special guests; so the attendance was a bit lower than we expected but the feedback from the audience was great and had so much interesting questions that we finally got kicked out of the room :-)Thursday, I went to see the new JBoss project GateIn that has been announced which is the ExoPlatform/JBoss Portal joint project. Definitely Interesting stuff, their booth was packed all day long and the project and UI are very slick. Those guys were definitely interested in Mobicents as well to be able to send SMS from the portal or click to dial kind of portlet, ... so a another proof of concept should see the light soon here as well.In the afternoon, I went to see the Web Beans and HornetQ (JBoss Messaging renamed) presentations which were both of great quality. Finally, we went to the Museum of Science and Industry party sponsored by IBM which was a lot of fun and then did a bit of pub crawling, on which I won't reveal the dirty details :-)The last day was actually half a day and I attended to Bob's Mc Wirther presentation on TorqueBox which was the best one I attended too.My session was among the last ones which was not very convenient because a lot of people already left the conference (1/3 to half I would say) but the attendance to the session was still pretty good (around 30 people in the room) and the presentation was very well received with a lot of feedback and exchange with the audience once again.To wrap up on JBoss World, I would say that this was a rather good success for Mobicents/JBCP, it was very well received with a lot of people baffled by the platform and how it grew up in a year.I uploaded my presentation hereSo Thanks for coming and for coming at us, talk to us we love that, meeting the community in person and we will make sure that next year will be even better :-)Update : For more pictures from chicago, see here : http://picasaweb.google.com/jean.deruelle/Chicago2009#Update 2 : List of all JBoss World presentations and videos [Less]