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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Network Manager is a SailFin module that handles Grizzly integration, message parsing, ByteBuffers, thread pools etc. Ramesh, the module owner for network manager layer in SailFin Project, has started a series of blogs [1,2] explaining the knobs available to configure SailFin SIP container for high performance. Checkout Eltjo Boersma's blog for more details about configuration of SailFin network listeners.

On the JCP front, JSR 289 has been submitted for final approval ballot. Click here to download the latest version of the specification.

Ted and ICEfaces team has put together a demo showcasing "AJAX Push" and SIP communication. The demo is about setting up a call between sip phones of two users from a web browser. The web page gets updated with the details of the users as soon as the sip phone is registered (or unregistered) with the demo SIP application in SailFin. The demo is packaged as a SipServlet archive (.sar) file and can be directly deployed into sailfin by dropping into the autodeploy directory. The full source code of the demo is available in the svn repository. There is also an one minute video podcast of the demo.

Examples of more converged applications on SailFin are available in the SailFin samples page and also here and here.