Today was the release of SailFin v2 (download, home, wiki) and its companion Sun GlassFish Communications Server 2.0 (download, home). SailFin v2 is a big release; it leverages GlassFish v2.1.1 (more tomorrow) and adds a number of features including high availability, rolling upgrade, flexible network topology, better overload protection, Diameter support, improved diagnosability, Java based DCR files for the load balancer, and more. I can't cover SailFin v2 properly but I'll collect some of the relevant links so you can follow them up.  Start with Binod's overview: SailFin v2 Released! and move from there:

Some of the major changes are:

• A new replica selection algorithm that improves scalability by easing load distribution after failure.
• Enhancements to the Converged Load Balancer to support writing DCR rules in Java.
• The ability to do rolling upgrades leverages session replication; see this example.
• Improved use of multihoming features for more flexible deployments. See Ramesh's writeup.
• Diameter support in Sun's for-fee AddOn; see details in Venu's many posts, including [1] and [2].
• Improved load protection.  See Robert's one pager and Sankar's work on JMX Notification.

As part of the release, the team has posted a number of new entries, including:

• Next is what? (Prasad)
• Subscribing to user state using Sun Diameter Sh API (Venu)
• Setup and Configure Diameter on SailFin (Naman Mehta)
• Diameter Administration on SailFIn 2.0 (Yamini KB)
• SailFin v2 Released (Srikanth Anandal)
• CLB Enhancements in SailFin 2.0 (Kshitiz Saxena)
• Overload Protection in SailFin: What's new in 2.0 (Rampsarathy)
• Tips and Tricks of SailFin HA (Bhavani Shankar)
• Multihoming in SailFin. (Ramesh)

• TA entries tagged SailFin,
• Prasad's earlier roundup: "SailFin 2.0 is Around the Corner!"
• Sreeram's notes on SailFin amazon images.
• How to write Conference App in 15 lines of nicely formatted code!

Finally, a list for PR/Press reports:

• Sun Communications Server Speaks VoIP (The H Open Source)
• Barron's, BusinesWire.

Note - GlassFish v2.1.1 is also available from Sun's Download Center and from the Community Site. More on that release tomorrow. And the OpenMQ 4.4 (and 4.4.1 RC1) are available from here.

Rolling upgrade is a necessary feature to avert system down time. Needless to say that it is very important for telco environments. In his latest blog entry, Bhavani explains the rolling upgrade support in Sailfin V2. The newly added SailFin HA sample has been enhanced to demonstrate rolling upgrade also.

Session replication is used to prevent loss of sessions during rolling upgrade (and also in case of a failure). Sreedhar explains the new replica selection algorithm used in SailFin V2 and its benefits. Check it out!

Gregory Bond was right, when he wrote, this is the year of converged application frameworks, while announcing Converge. The number of frameworks and libraries available for sip application development continue to increase. Earlier this week, Richard Newman announced his Clojure SIP servlets library in the SailFin community. Take a look!.

SailFin CAFE is also shaping up well and development is in full swing with contributions from both Sun and Ericsson. Here are some(one, two) getting started guides for SailFin CAFE.

Given the asynchronous nature of SIP, debugging issues in a SIP application server could turn out to be a nightmare. Tools like Wireshark are widely used for tracing SIP messages in the network. SailFin v2 implements a new feature that allows users to inspect SIP message flow in the container more effectively. Take a look at Peter's one pager and Sankar's blog on SIP Message Inspection for more details.

This new feature compliments SIP access logging, which is similar to more familiar HTTP access logging.

Improving the clustering and high availability has been the focus of SailFin V2. Now, a new 3PCC (Third party call control) converged sample application demonstrating the session failover feature of sailfin has been integrated. The 3PCC sample has been written to follow the guidelines from RFC 3725. The sample has been bundled with nightly builds, from today. Take a look at Bhavani's bogs here for details.

SailFin is closing on v2.0 which is aligned with GlassFish v2.1.1 (both scheduled for the end of October, see Roadmap) and the team has been highlighting new features in the release: • Prasad Announces HCF, provides an overview and a List of Fixes since SCF. • Shreedhar writes about the Support for SSR (SIP Session Replication). • Ramesh describes the Configuration Options, including DNS failover and Converged LB. • Prateek Announces a new AMIs for SailFin based on OpenSolaris.   (also see EC2 Blog and Full List of Sun's AMIs)

There are multiple IDE options for developing sip servlet applications in sailfin. Netbeans plugin is available for SIP Servlet development and for full fledged IMS service creation environment, Ericsson SDS can be used. For those eclipse fans, the recent versions of glassfish plugin has been enhanced to provide a much better SIP Servlet application development experience. Take a look at this blog from Vince for all details and tips for upgrading to newest plugin.

SailFin V2 significantly enhances the availability of the application server from the initial version. Managing the network traffic is very important in creating a highly available service/application execution environment. Ramesh has blogged about traffic separation in SailFin. He explains how the intra-cluster communication (converged load balancer, GMS) can be isolated from the external traffic by utilizing the multiple network interfaces in the server machines.

SailFin V2 is approaching HCF (hard code freeze) next week on the way to final release in October 2009. Take a look at the schedule in the wiki.

Diameter support in SailFin is progressing well. Venu has blogged about steps to use Sh api for updating user profile information in HSS (eg: Open IMS). In another post, he explains using onine charging in SailFin. Also, Sailfin V2 has crossed the SCF (soft code freeze) last week and is progressing towards the release in October 2009. You can download V2 b23 here.

Recently, we have started receiving inquiries about hosting options for SailFin. A few months back SailFin team had setup a demo server in a Go Daddy server. It has worked out quite well so far. Now, Sreeram has written a blog about running SailFin (V2 b20) with Amazon EC2. He gives details such as enabling SIP UDP port, MySQL configuration and using DynDNS to setup the domain name. Try it out!

Sailfin CAFE is a new framework that simplifies the development of Converged Web apps. It can be used with Sailfin v2 and points to Sailfin v3. The project just launched and we want your feedback and participation. Check out Binod's Writeup, Sreeram's Mail Post and the slides from TS-4929 (id:contentbuilder / pw:doc789). Sailfin CAFE is a key step towards yet another "v3" container in the GlassFish family joining GlassFish v3 Server (out in September) and OpenESB v3 - making good progress through Project Fuji. The WebSpace Server is also going v3 but they have not yet started working on their builds.

The Diameter protocol (RFC 3588) is designed to provide an Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) framework for applications. SailFin will be adding support for Diameter protocol by 2nd half of CY2009. Sh (Subscriber profile interface), Rf (Offline Charging interface), Ro (Online charging interface) will be available. Take a look at Venu's post for details of Sh api support, JavaDocs and example code. Also, Naman has written a good overview of Diameter Protocol.

Telco Application servers such as SailFin require a more deterministic GC model with predictable pause time, and also that scales well on multiple processors. Waiting for a long time to connect a telephone call is clearly unacceptable. Performance team at Sun spent a lot of time tuning GC while testing SailFin for high work loads. Bharath has written a series of blog entries (here and here) explaining his experience. Take a look.

More resources on SailFin V1 is available now. Prasad has written a Tech Tip on Converged Java EE applications. He explains how different SIP Servlet artifacts can be used from Java EE components like EJBs. Also, Varun has posted couple of entries on Getting Started with SailFin clustering (I,II). A test application, sipp scenario files for testing, etc are attached to the blog. Take a look!

STUN (Simple Traversal of User Datagram Protocol Through Network Address Translators) defined in RFC 3489 (and RFC 5389) is one mechanism for NAT traversal. It assists SIP clients behind a NAT firewall or router with their packet routing. SailFin V2 now has a basic STUN server, which SIP clients can use. Checkout Ramesh's blog to find all details.