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Once every year, the mobicents team gets together to discuss the state of the mobicents nation, and in the time between, to party around. Since the previous location doesn't bring us the best memories, this year we chosed Brno in Czech Republic to be ... [More] our meeting point. The decision was a little bit influenced by Pavel, with promises of great team building activities.Unfortunately the Portuguese members of the team had trouble to get there, and missed the first day (and the first night). Once we got there we tried to compensate the time lost. Each day after the meetings all the fun begun. On Tuesday there was this football mach Portugal & Poland vs. Rest of the World where the Rest of the World team lost in the last minute with a goal scored with the hand (sorry guys). On Wednesday we went for a kart race that everybody enjoyed, not only because of the speed but also because of the crashes. We also had great dinners every day (I really appreciated the Czech cuisine) and after that we would go out in Brno's night. Surprisingly, no one got late for the meetings on the next day.Regarding the work, we covered what we achieved last year, and the list is pretty amazing:Jain-SLEE is certified 2.0Sip-Servlets has reached GAMedia server 1.0 has reached GA, 2.0 is under way.Diameter has also become GA and increased the number of supported applicationsWe also did great progresses on Documentation and ProdutizationThe road maps we discussed for the projects are also very ambitious:Fault Tolerance and High Availability for both Jain-SLEE and Sip-ServletsVideo and SS7 support on media serverManagement (cross-platform)IMS components on top of Jain-SLEE (HSS, X-CSCF)Improve the Jain-SIP stackFor my task inside the project, Quality Assurance, the main achievements were the releases of Mobicents-all 1.2.0 and 2 releases of JBoss Communication Platform during the last year, as well as a bunch of other GA releases for the individual projects. We also agreed on a new process to have more Mobicents-all releases with less effort. In the last month we we granted 2 new dedicated servers on QA lab that will ease the load testing of our projects. On the hudson front, the coverage now is more extent and we agreed that the developers will keep an eye on the warnings gave by the findbugs jobs.For the near future we plan to cover the FT/HA features on the lab, first with a simple setup, and hopefully evolving to a more realistic one. We also plan to increase our coverage of media tests, as well as the coverage on protocols other than SIP. Interrupting these tasks will be a never ending stream of releases for the different projects and each one needs to get trough a final review, making sure that is not broken.We are all looking for the next year meeting already. If you know some place where we could have lots of fun, please leave a note and we will consider it. Pictures of the good times we had this year can be found on http://picasaweb.google.pt/lbbbarreiro/MobicentsMeetingBrno.The usual suspects: Jean, Ivelin, Amit, Luis, Bartosz, Vladimir, Alexandre, EduardoOur good host Pavel couldn't attend to this dinner.Have fun, [Less]

It was that time of the year again when the Mobicents Team meets face-2-face to discuss the achievements made through the current year, plan the roadmaps for the upcoming year and last but not the least, party a lot!This time it happened in Brno, the ... [More] second largest city in Czech Republic, but at least for this week it was the funniest! Only possible thanks to Pavel, who led us through Brno! Thank You!It had a quite troubled start, with the Portuguese members (me included) ending up by missing the plane due to issues with the airlines company (which suspended their operations since Sept. 1st). We made it anyway, missing the first day.Regarding Mobicents, the 2009 achievements were quite amazing:Mobicents SIP Servlets, Mobicents Diameter and Mobicents Media Server became GA.Mobicents JAIN SLEE 2.x had it's first version, BETA1, which was certified for JAIN SLEE 1.1 (JSR 240), being the first besides the specs leader, and still the only open source.Although all this being accomplished, there's still much more to work on, and a lot of new projects to stabilize. One of the hottest topics was the High-Availability across all these servers, which as you can understand is not a trivial subject and had a quite intense discussion.On my side, I made a presentation regarding Diameter (available here), the main project where I'm involved. For the achievements of 2009, we have highlighted the following:Integration with Mobicents SIP Servlets;Sh-Client/Server Application support (3GPP TS 29.328 & TS 29.329);Credit Control Application support (RFC 4006);Ro/Rf Application support (3GPP TS 32.225 & TS 32.299);Cx/Dx Application support (3GPP TS 29.228 & TS 29.229)This was a great improvement for an year! But we won't stop and will evolve it even further, with the following features being the most important ones:High-Availability;Management Console (cross-server);NAT (STUN/TURN/ICE) support;WebServices support;IMS Applications prototypes (HSS/x-CSCF)So it's still a long road ahead of us, and now it's when the fun begins! And we are counting on the Mobicents Community for helping us out improving!Here's a picture taken at the end of my presentation:Left to right: Pavel, Bartosz, Amit, Jean, Vladimir, me, Ivelin, Luis and Eduardo.And the team warming up for dinner (Pavel is missing and I'm taking the picture):Left to right: Luis, Amit, Eduardo, Bartosz, Vladimir, Ivelin and Jean.Cheers for Mobicents team and hope for another successful year! [Less]

JBossWorld is over. Overall, it was a good experience and a big step ahead in gaining mindshare, especially with Jean's efforts to deliver the Mobicents message internally and externally.On the BOF side we ended up with a few requests about how to ... [More] get started. So, this is the Rapid Telco App Development BOF Slide DeckAnd the other useful links discussed:Mobicents Homepage JBCP Homepage Sip Servlets Examples Seam Telco Framework Eclipse Update Site Media Server Homepage And for the people with no experience in Telco, this is the fast-track on the theory:SIP protocol/RTP protocol tutorial (you can also check the SIP Protocol Specification)Sip Servlets specMedia Server User GuideTake some software SIP phones and play with the examplesI hope it helps and if there is anything else we'd be glad to give more info. [Less]

That's right! It's a complete new world for me now that I've started my own blog.First of all, let me introduce myself and the role of this blog:I'm a Software Engineer working for JBoss R&D on the open source telco framework Mobicents. I've been ... [More] using and developing services for it for almost 4 years, namely in JAIN SLEE server, and roughly 2 years ago I started to work on the core team, developing JAIN SLEE core and started from scratch along with Bartosz Baranowski the Diameter component for the project.It's been a wonderful experience so far, I've learned a lot from all the team members, all JBoss community and from work itself!Regarding the blog, it's been a project that I've always been delaying but I think the time has come and I hope I can keep it up! I expect to write on a regular basis, mainly with new announcements, some hints regarding my work... and whatever comes to my mind! :)See you soon! [Less]

Here we go.During our dev struggle to get v2 of Mobicents JSLEE container operational we encountered quite big problem: Class Loading scheme.Usually class loaders are organized in classic tree structure:one rooteach leaf can have only one parenteach ... [More] leaf can be a root of a subtreeThis has certain limitations, as proven by our JSLEE 1.0 container. Without classloader repositories/isolation there is no way for two versions of the same ra(service/Sbb/Profile) to be deployed and enabled.Moreover it is not possible to maintain integrity of classes loaded - consider situation:DU1 has service using lib.jarDU2 also has service using lib.jarorder of deply is: DU1,DU2when DU2 is deployed, classloader finds lib.jar classes and does not load themDU1 and DU2 services kick in, instances of lib.jar classes are created (from DU1 definition)now DU1 is undeployederror on class casting - vague information: can not cast XXYX.class to XXYX.classNow regarding Mobicents JSLEE v1. JSLEE Specs did not define any way of providing dependency classes. To resolve this problem we altered a bit DU structure, each DU jar could have "library" dir with dependencies for particular DU. This proved to be enough to solve dependencies, however all above problems still apply.Obviously JSR240 specs lead got a notion that specs lack something valuable here and in 1.1 it has been improved.In 1.1 container "library" component has been introduced. It is not a functional component/jar - not in terms of slee, like SbbComponent or ProfileCompoment. Its only purpose is to provide standarised and versioned way to provide classes to Slee components. So no more DU/library!!Now about classloaders. In SLEE v1.1 model has changed as well. Its a bit tricky. Consider classic model - tree, where each classloader with one parent. This is not sufficient for SLEE v1.1. New model allows multiple parent for each leaf to reflect components relation.Classloaders are defined per component - that is not jar, but actual identifiable component(which has ComopnentID). Component class loader loads all classes from component jar "and" all classes from referenced components.Consider case of jar file which contains definition of Sbb1, Sbb2 and Sbb3 - all sbb classes are in jar.So:three classloaders - Sbb1,Sbb2, Sbb3 - each "has" classes from jarSbbX classloader has access to all referenced component classloadersActually component class loaders deffer queries to jar domain classloader to avoid that vague ClassCastException described above. Through references in xml descriptor classlaoder association is built(multiple parents - Sbb components usually references events, ras, other sbbs, profiles, etc...) - this is place where multiple parents are introduced. See diagram below, this should give a hint: [Less]

Yes, thats true. Me and Alex managed to contribute enough time(even though he was sick and I was busy with personal erands) to make another diameter release. Still follow up will contain standalone documentation (yupieeee!!) with examples of ... [More] configuration and setup.More about release here.Would like to make reminder about VM image we created with openIMS predeployed to make users life a bit easier, atleast for testing:image.readme.Thats it for today. Cheers [Less]

This august was quiet a big deal, Mobicents Team met in Brno office which was kind enough(or else) to host annual meeting. Almost all of us made it to office without any incident, however we still missed three team members which did not make it.As ... [More] usual it was tons of work and work. Since last year mobicents grew a lot (maybe not a good estimate but svn code and commits have been more than doubled, with team not expanding at all) so we had a lot of topics to go through. During las year three of our project reached GA status:Sip ServletsMedia ServerDiameterTwo other has already got successor:Media ServerJAIN SleeIn short last year achievements are:JSR 289 certification (Sip Servlets 1.1) JSR 240 certification( JSLEE 1.1, achieved by container v2.0.0.B1)Media Server modular architectureDiameter GASeam Telco Framework reaching stabilityDuring meeting four topics reached level of "hot":SS7 world mobicents role in IMS cloudJSLEE 1.1 container architectureHAMedia Server architecture(See next post for some cool stuff that we talked about or did not talk )Thats how we spent our time in the office - except me and Amit killing each other bond style(we were supposed to go for paintball, but eventually it has been canceled).My main project(aside Diameter and JSLEE) is Media Server for the time beeing. Thats the one me and my co-mates were supposed to cover during this meeting.However one of our MMS team member did not make it to Brno me and Amit were supposed to cover his topics(MMS Architecture & SS7 introduction) - in practice presentations we created were covered by Amit.Topics that left for me wereBase HA framework - how to achieve HA for non cache replicated resourcesMMS Control protocols(which I did not present, see my other posts)Seems like very abstract topic, atleast first one. Well thats correct. Moreover its not a trivial one (HA). During my preparations for this subject I made a lot of tests and research to get a hint what lies ahead of team to achieve. Its a bit scary I must tell. It gets insanly complicated since Mobicents covers different EE - just consider case when one has different EEs, different protocols and must provide HA and FT balancer for that bunch - feeling that headache comming?Aside my HA session we had one covered by Jean D and Vladimir R. Outcome? To make it short:improve JSIP stackmake JSIP stack modular so it supports replication of datafinalize LB strategycooperate on Fault Tolertant FrameworkWhat if FTF? Simple acronym that should in future cover some cool features(See next posts :) ).What about fun part?It was not bad at all, even though academic year has not started:Before plunging into disco:Get up early, go to work, eat late and party till morning. Here we are at eating part, good food, perfect beer, even portugal folks prefered it over wine:And here we give a go to extreme sports part, carts made it a day, except few of us getting burns blisters from engine, it was worth chasing other team members around track: [Less]

There is no other way to start anything other than an hello, and so here am I saying hello and welcoming you to this new space that I'm creating.The reasons why I'm creating yet another blog are several. I don't plan to post a lot, but I'll try to do ... [More] it with quality, both in shape and content. I'll try to come up with interesting material, not only about my professional life and other technical issues, but also about other stuff that I may find relevant.More about me can always be found in my personal home page, http://barreirao.pt.tc/, if you can read and understand Portuguese. WhatDog lives on.Have fun, [Less]