One of last week's announcements was the Sun GlassFish Communications Server (Product, SailFin, TA posts). I believe SailFin will play a significant role in accelerating the adoption of the converged (SIP+HTTP) web, and the latest issue of Ericsson Review (01/2009) has an Article explaining the perspective of the telcos. Quoting from there:

Continuous changes in business environments as well as the convergence of media, entertainment, and communication businesses and solutions require a new approach to system design, pricing, product packaging, deployment, and support.

Traditionally the Telco industry has addressed their extreme requirements (scalability, reliability, manageability) through proprietary software, but this is very expensive and, instead, several of them (Ericsson and Sun included) created the OpenSAF (member list) Foundation to create an Open-Source middleware base platform they can use. And the platform is based on Java EE 5 and uses SailFin.

Thanks to Sreeram for the tip.

GlassFish Communication Server and GlassFish Mobility Platform will be hosting demos in Sun booth (Booth #2C12, Hall 2) at Mobile World Congress, Barcelona. Meet us, if you are at Barcelona next week (16th-19th Feb).

The demos include Load Balancer Visualization for SailFin, SailFin Communicator application (with MySQL cluster career grade server as the back-end database) and Mobile Enterprise Platform with On-Device Portal. Sun has also invited Ericsson to demonstrate Ericsson's Intelligent Network technology, built on GlassFish.

This week's webinar is on Friday, Jan 30th, 9:30 am PT (note the different date and time). Binod PG and Sreeram Duvur will provide an overview of SailFin, the Open Source Communications Server in GlassFish that supports the converged web built on HTTP and SIP. The presentation will include background material on the SIP world. Slides and other material will be posted to the Presentation Page; as usual, we encourage your participation through questions and recordings of the presentations will be made available later.

Today we released GlassFish v2.1 and Sailfin 1.0. GlassFish v2.1 is the latest public release of our full featured Java EE AppServer and it includes significant stability and feature improvements. See Paul's announcement (Java.Net, MarkMail) for some details on the release and also check out the Comparison Table between v2 and v3. GlassFish v2.1 is the basis on which Sailfin builds our SIP-based open source Communications Server. See Srikanth's announcement (Java.Net, MarkMail) for some details. If you are interested in these releases, please pencil-in our Online Webinar for Feb 10th. Details, including speaker(s), when available.

In the last few months Sun has expanded significantly our online outreach efforts and we currently have (at least :-)) three Webinar series that cover the GlassFish products. Going through them:

The MySQL webinars are polished presentations that are broadcasted in high-quality and targeted at specific busines needs. Future presentations include Binod on MySQL and SailFin and Arun on JRuby, NetBeans and GlassFish. These presentations are also available for Replay. A very similar series is the new Software Webinar series. Future events include OpenSSO and MDM; replays available include GlassFish HA and more. Finally, we also have our weekly TheAquarium Online. These Community presentations, broadcasted using uStream.TV are more informal and technical.

SailFin is the Open Source Communications Server that is based on the GlassFish Server. We launched the effort with Ericsson back in May '07 with first builds in June '07 (see all SailFin-tagged entries) and we are nearing the first release.

A Communication Server requires new functionality like SIP-support but also has strong requirements on availability and quality of service. Some of this functionality is done in SailFin and some in the underlying GlassFish v2.1; both releases will be available in a few weeks so expect an increased coverage. Binod published several in early December ([1], [2]) and Sreeram published a couple of entries on SailFin just before the Holiday break.

Sreeram's first entry is an Short Summary of news including a pointer to the Eclipse-based Ericsson Service Development Studio, and the IPTV trials at Sonaecom. Sreeram's second post is a substantial Technical Overview covering its core architecture and administration, its subsystems, the development and deployment model, and the new SIP and Carrier-Grade features.

Finally, pencil-in Jan 29th, 2009 for a SailFin Webinar where we will provide some background to SIP and these new converged web applications in addition to a presentation on SailFin and demos.

RFC 3261 defines the basic set of requirements of a SIP implementation. Some parts of the RFC need fine tuning so that it works for all corner cases. I have blogged about how Record Routing proxies can be buggy when the implementation is strictly compliant with RFC 3261. SailFin uses sun deployment descriptor to handle such corner cases. Venu continues sharing information on SailFin security. This time, it is about configuring Nonce Manager. Another good entry is from Sankar about handling Parameterable headers.

Venu has blogged about RFC 4474 support in SailFin. This feature introduces a mechanism for securely identifying originators of SIP messages. A lot more information about this feature is available here and here. It is also worthwhile to look at the following blogs to know more about security in SailFin.  1. Authentication of SIP Servlet Resources (I, II, III)  2. RunAS and P-Asserted-Identity

Next week, I will post an entry on how SailFin handles some of the spec related issues in RFC 3261 and JSR 289.

SIP technology, the basis of Project SailFin, is consolidating its position as the leading standard for setting up and tearing down converged multimedia communication sessions. Communication Service Providers are investing in Service Delivery Platforms (SDP) to leverage the opportunity presented by the network convergence. The Service Execution Environment is a key layer of any SDP, and the application servers and databases are the key components of this layer.

A new white paper about Creating a Carrier Grade Service Execution Environment with MySQL Cluster and the Sun GlassFish Communications Server is available now. Take a look. You need a MySQL account to access the white paper.

Over the next couple of weeks, I will be posting a series of entries to take a closer look at SailFin, specifically the SIP container. If you havent tried SailFin so far, give it a whirl.

The Diameter protocol is designed to provide an Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) framework for applications. The Diameter base protocol is defined by RFC 3588. The 3GPP standards body has adopted Diameter as the primary signaling protocol for AAA and mobility management in the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS).

In an IMS architecture, an application server like SailFin will use Diameter to communicate with HSS (Home Subscriber Server). HSS is a central subscriber database that performs AAA and helps in locating the user. Traffix systems announced that it will officially join the GlassFish Partner Program and Traffix’s OpenBloX(TM) Diameter will become a preferred Diameter platform for Project SailFin. OpenBloX Diameter integration with SailFin will be facilitated by a J2EE Connector 1.5 resource adapter and a Diameter java library.

MS6 of SailFin is available for download. Please download and give it a try. And previous entries on Sailfin at TheAquarium are here.

Milestone 6 of SailFin is now available for download!. This release includes a number of bug fixes including JSR 289 TCK related issues. Prasad's blog gives more details and the list of 141 bugs fixed after MS5.

JSR 289 TCK provides much more coverage than its earlier version (~500 tests) and we had numerous questions on the tests. Mihir (spec lead from Oracle) answered all of them very quickly and SailFin passed all tests last week. Thanks Mihir. Here is the link to the test results and here is the latest TCK errata SailFin is using.

Also take a look at the details about session invalidation in Bhavani's blog, a key new feature introduced in Sip Servlet 1.1. This feature replaces the original session expiration model in Sip Servlets 1.0 and is expected to make the applications more scalable.

Milestone 5 of SailFin is now available for download! The product is feature complete with this milestone and all the features have already crossed beta stage. The implementation team (from Sun and Ericsson) is now busy in fixing bugs and the final release is expected by end of this calendar year.

Prasad's blog explains the following key aspects of this milestone.  1. All JSR 289 (SIPServlet 1.1)features are implemented  2. Support for RFC 3891 and RFC 3911 (Join/Replace support)  3. RFC 4474: Authenticated identity management in SIP  4. Session Replication has crossed beta quality.  5. Access Logging support for SIP messages. More SailFin coverage on this blog can be found here.

Shreedhar is announcing a new build release for Shoal 1.1, the GlassFish dynamic clustering framework. Version 1.1 is work in progress and offers a JoinedAndReadyNotificationSignal, multiple clusters support for the same member (useful for Sailfin's Converged Load-Balancer), cross subnet clustering support, etc.

The most important driver for the Shoal project lately has been the Sailfin project (now in alpha stage). Compared to HTTP, SIP sessions are smaller in size but greater in number so this has been a very interesting set of constraints for this group management and data replication technology.

If you're new to the technology, Shoal is at the heart of the GlassFish v2 clustering architecture and uses JXTA as an underlying technology. This article is a nice introduction if you're new to the technology which is also used in other projects such as GreenFire.

Project SailFin, built on top of GlassFish, provides a platform for developing and deploying converged Java EE and SIP Servlets applications. SailFin V1 Alpha is now available for download.

Prasad has written a detailed description about the features in this release. Check it out. Check previous entries on SailFin at TheAquarium also. SailFin is already the basis for the projects like Presence Support in Web Synergy, DFC Application Router in ECharts, Sun Labs Conference Manager etc. The project team is now working on completing the implementation of the recently approved JSR 289 Final Release. Final release of SailFin V1 is expected by end of this calendar year.

The SE/EE Executive Comittee of the JCP has approved (results) JSR 289, the SIP Servlet 1.1 Specification that is the core for SailFin. The final specification is not yet available but the PFD 2 should be very close. The first public release of SailFin will be aligned with GlassFish v2.1 and will happen around the end of the year; updated roadmaps are due in a few weeks.