We now have a name for Sun's commercial distribution of Sailfin: Sun GlassFish Communications Server. Sailfin will support SIP Servlet 1.1 and can be used to develop applications using IM, VoIP and shared multimedia. The initial release is expected in the fall of this year and will be aligned with GF v2.1.

Check the Press Release for more details. Also, Ericsson and Sun are holding a Contest for Sailfin Applications. And previous entries on Sailfin at TheAquarium are here.

The previous SailFin post covered a fair bit of ground but somehow managed to forget about Jan's "Converged Http Sessions in SailFin" post. Using the Click-to-dial sample application, Jan starts off introducing us to the ConvergedHttpSession that is defined in JSR 289 (SIPServlet 1.1) before moving on to Sailfin converged load-balancer behavior and SSR (Sip Session Retainability). In an equally well-documented post, Bhavani shares his SIMPLE SipServlet implementation of a presence and chatting feature powered by Sailfin and based on SIMPLE, the SIP-based protocol for instant messaging (IM) and presence. A screencast and full source code (developed with NetBeans' SIPServlet capabilities) are also available. As a reminder, Sailfin's Milestone 4 is available to download here.

Quite a bit of SailFin activity in the past few days. First of all, we now have Milestone 4, a "feature complete" build which includes call-flow support for SIP calls, session failover and recovery of various SIP artifacts, and more. Next, Ericsson has posted a "Service Development Studio (SDS) 4.0 Sailfin Installation Instructions" document on their Ericsson Mobility World website (free registration required). The document explains how to Sailfin-enable their Eclipse-based SDS end-to-end IMS developer tool.

There's also a new blogger - Ivo Boger, adding to the list of others Sailfin-related blogs: Sailfin's main blog, Yamini's blog, and Bhavani Shankar's Blog.

Finally, Prasad Subramanian has a fairly detailed "Adding Voice to Java EE With SIP Servlets" article going into the basics of SIP, SIPServlet, JSR 289 annotations, sailfin, all including code and Binod blogs about Locating SIP servers using DNS in SailFin.

Kshitiz has a note on the new Java-based Converged Load Balancer that will be part of SailFin and GlassFish v2.1. The CLB handles both HTTP and SIP traffic and can be used with and without a hardware IP sprayer. Check Kshitiz's Detailed Writeup for details on load balancing algorithms and configuration options.

We are getting closer to the next GF releases (see my Previous Overview), we are seeing more features from the GFv2.1/SailFin release. Recent entries include:

• Shoal Extended with Multi-Group Membership, used in... • Setting Load Balancers via the Converged Load Balancer (CLB). • Improved Call Flow Monitoring that supports SIP requests. • Flexible Application Routers

The last two are more specific to the SIP case, but the general facility of multi-group membership should be useful to many Shoal applications, and a Java-based CLB should simplify at the least the simple LB situations. I'll get more details on the the CLB and will report back.

Correction - CLB is only available in SailFin, not in the corresponding core GFv2.1. GlassFish v3 will include a java LoadBalancer. Thanks to Kshitiz for the correction.

DZone has an interview up with two of the Sailfin developers. Sailfin in the project developed in commun with Ericsson to provide a SIP-enabled application server. The interview goes into the value of writing "converged applications" which lets the developer access the contents of both SIPsession and HTTPSession from the same code and thus provide exiting new possibilities for rich media interactions. This is not (only) telco software for the telco world!

Vince gets into how much work has gone into enhancing NetBeans 6.1 to ease development (previous coverage on TheAquarium here), including the testing side of things (a SIP injector really). Sailfin is built to provide SIPServlet support as an extension to GlassFish, leveraging its existing administration, performance, and clustering technologies. Of course, being an open source project is another key value of the projects.

More Sailfin coverage on this blog can be found here.
Get started with Sailfin at http://sailfin.dev.java.net.

SailFin (and GlassFish v2.1) is making good progress towards the features and schedule described in the Current Plan - also see these older TA Entries. The core driver for SailFin is SIP-support; on the infrastructure side, some good recent writeups cover the Load Balancer and the Grizzly-based Stack.

On Tools and Apps - key for the adoption of SIP, see the recent ECharts announcement on Sailfin Support and Klein Peter's 3-part series on SIP Apps with Sailfin: [1], [2] and [3]. Also note that the the GlassFish Awards Program includes the Sailfin projects, so I'd encourage your submissions for that $175K pot!

Added: Also see The Sailfin Blog and the list of NB Tools (thanks to Vince for that tip).

NetBeans 6.1 Milestone 1 is feature-frozen. Vince reports on the improved integration with the sailfin project with : - Explicit reference to Sailfin in the 'Add Server Instance' dialog (vs. GlassFish) - SIP Servlet applications visible in the "Services" tab If you feel brave-enough to test the latest nightly builds, follow this link. As it stands, NetBeans 6.1 is stalled for the end of April. Previous coverage of sailfin is HERE.

Milestone 3 of Sailfin (the open source effort with Sun, Ericsson and others to provided a SIP-enable GlassFish) is now available ! Get the bits from HERE (full install, no GlassFish required). The keywords for this release are "Administration" & "Monitoring", the converged HTTP/SIP load-balancer is improved too but we're not yet at "Feature Freeze".

The key features delivered in this Milestone are :  1. Support JSR289 (SIPServlet 1.1) annotations  2. ConsistentHash algorithm for loadbalancing SIP and HTTP  3. Admin GUI support for CLB/Security/SIP Service  4. Admin CLI support for CLB/Security/SIP Service  5. Monitoring support for SIP Servlet Container  6. AMX support for SIP Servlet Container.  7. Session replication for SipApplicationSessions, SipSessions, ServletTimers, DialogFragments.

Sailfin is expected to deliver its first release in June of 2008 (beta in March of 2008). More from Prasad in his entry.

Sailfin development is moving along quite well and the recently posted Public Review for JSR 289 (SIPServlet 1.1, one of the technologies implemented in Sailfin) is taking us one step closer to development of converged SIP/HTTP applications. Vince is reporting on the Module Suite for NetBeans 6.0 for SIPServlet development with Sailfin and the community involvement in that effort. NetBeans modules are available here and they integrate a SIP protocol level test agent.

ECharts is open source software to program SIP Servlets with feature boxes, SIP message ports, and state-machine logic rather than overriding servlet methods and managing sessions. SailFin Milestone 2 is supported in the latest ECharts for SIP Servlets DK (version 2.2 beta), providing thus a full open source solution. More details on the combination here.

ECharts for SIP Servlets DK also includes a JSR289-compliant application router implementation that enables SIP Servlet 1.1 application composition.

Check this ECharts for SIP Servlets Screencast for a feel of what it's like to program a back-to-back user agent application using the ECharts language (syntax similar to Java, only with "states" and "transations").

Sailfin development is moving along nicely and so is it's tooling part now with SIP Application Development Module version 0.2 for NetBeans 6.0 and a detailed installation document. •  new is a "Converged Servlet Application" project template. •  full specifications are listed in this document. As detailed in this document, the next sailfin milestone build in December is Feature freeze.

Prasad has written an Overview note explaining the relationship between SailFin and the core GlassFish AppServer. This expands on my earlier note and on Abhijit's note. In a nutshell, GFv2.1 adds all the non-SIP specific features to the core GlassFish AppServer (building on the GFv2 UR1 release) and SailFin builds directly on that.

Sailfin, the (SIPServlet) communication application server based on GlassFish and Ericsson's contribution, has hit Milestone 1 (56Mb). This is built on top of GlassFish v2 and offers the following features: Grizzly integration in SIP container, Administration Backend, CLI, deployment, web container, load-balancing proxy. The ClickToDial sample application has also been updated to fix a bug (wrong SDP in Acknowledgement) which made it fail on many soft phones like X-Lite. Next stop: Milestone 2 in October 2007 with Admin GUI, converged load-balancing, Session replication across SIP/HTTP, cluster deployment, JSR 289 tooling, and cluster support for 2 instance nodes.

The goal of every specification (say Java EE 5) is to make sense as a whole and document how it relates to other specification and technologies. A product (say GlassFish) needs to augment the specification with a set of coherent features to provide yet a more powerful and competitive toolset. GlassFish v2 has Grizzly (the nio framework), OpenESB 2.0 (the JBI implementation) and will soon have a SIP capabilities with project SailFin. This enables James Lorenzen to build a JBI Binding Component for RSS in Java but also in Groovy. Speaking of OpenESB, the list of binding components and service engines available is growing fast and the OpenESB tooling is getting better by the day.

Probably one of the great strengths of Groovy is the ability to mix and match with Java. Any Java code (almost?) is valid Groovy code so you can introduce the dynamic and agile code to places requiring many fast changes while keeping the rest static and performing fast. Grails (a web application framework using Groovy) runs well on GlassFish and we're interested in making sure all the value-add from GlassFish (say Metro) is fully available to Groovy and Grails developers.