Mobicents meets the Community at JUDCon and JBoss World !

Hi all,

I just got back from Boston where I attended JUDCon, the free JBoss Users & Developers Conference and spoke there about Mobicents. Since the attendance was pretty new to Telco and Communications 2.0 features, the talk was not a technical one but rather showcasing multiple demos, notably the Jopr is talking demo and examples on how you can improve your applications with Mobicents by adding Voice, Video, Presence, IM, SMS, data to enrich the user experience, processes within your company, the customer relationship etc... I went over the Mobicents projects - SIP Servlets, JAIN SLEE, Media Server, SIP Presence Service and Diameter and how they were used in the different demos showcased at the beginning of the presentation

Here are the slides of the presentation

The presentation was pretty well received and there was a long Q&A at the end with most of the people from the audience pretty interested asking questions and thinking on how they could apply it to their businesses. It was one of my best audiences ever !

I will try to record the presentation and upload it for those of you who couldn't attend.

I attended a few presentations during JUDCon and all talks and speakers were top notch quality and very interesting, definitely a conference you want to attend if you're a JBoss user or developper.

Later that day happened the JUDCon Hackfest where I got a chance to hack on a Tomcat container for Arquillian

This work will be used as a basis for refactoring our Mobicents SIP Servlets testsuite based on Arquillian and ShrinkWrap and expose it as a way to test SIP Servlets applications in a single Junit test. So JUDCon was definitely a great conference for me and Mobicents as a whole !

Next was JBoss World

There I got to meet multiple JBoss Communications Platform (JBCP - which is the product derived from Mobicents) and Mobicents users.


Notably OKI Japan with whom we had interesting talks and led to the announcement of their Spring Sip Servlets Framework - SSF contribution to Mobicents and their official joining as a Mobicents contributor

I had interesting talks with our friends at Angel.com and got to see them at the great JBoss party

For me and Mobicents, both JUDCon and JBoss World were definitely awesome, when working from home all year long I can't express how priceless it is to meet the community in flesh and blood.

See ya all next year !

Mobicents to enter Brain to Brain Communications Market

Hi all,

With the natural evolution of mobile networks towards LTE, 4G networks and the likes, soon we will be in this beautiful world of all IP Communications. We figured that even though Cell Phones were kind of cool, what would be the next step to communicate effortlessly.

Based on some research done throughout the world and recently some breakthrough on Brain to Brain Communications, we thought it was time to prepare our next move and prepare people to communicate and act with the digital world in a different way and call each other effortlessly by using brain to brain communications applied to telecommunications.

Since Brain to Brain Communication is cuurently using electrodes, a computer and an Internet connection. Replacing the electrodes and computer by a little Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI) device (that would look like a bluetooth earplug) that will be used for capturing brain signals and translating them into bits and will send those bits over the wire through a new protocol called Mobicents Brain's Fool Protocol (MBFP) just like a 4G cellphone would do. The Mobicents server will act as a gateway and convert MBFP to SIP so that you can call your buddies.

The possibilities are limitless again and will mostly depend on the device capabilities (that will evolve over time as science gets better knowledge of the brain) that could stream video or what your buddies see directly into your brain, or Text Message you, or send SMS...

If you're scared about the government tapping your brain or hackers unleashing viruses, trojan and the likes, security will be a big concern and taken care of very seriously but we can't promise anything, no software is bug free...

This won't be limited to Brain to Brain actually, one could easily create Business to Consumer (B2C) type of applications where you wouldn't need TV or 3D TV anymore : video streamed directly into your brain with all the sound, smells, pain, joy etc, what an awesome experience...
Where games would be a real brain control world experience, not motion controlled anymore...
Where you could record your life literally and not only share pictures and videos with your friends through facebook but real life memories with emotions through the new LifeRecorded social network

The good thing also would be for disabled people not being able to speak, this way they could communicate much easier and for the blind people to actually see since the device could be tied to a camera that would stream the live feed in their brain...

And again this technology will be open source for your greatest pleasure

As they say the brain is the limit...

Installing SIPp 3.1 on Ubuntu 9.04

Open a command line terminal

$ sudo apt-get install ncurses-dev
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential

#Grab sipp 3.1 from sourceforge.net 
$ wget -m -nd http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/sipp/sipp/3.1/sipp.3.1.src.tar.gz

#extract it locally
$ tar -xzf sipp.3.1.src.tar.gz
$ cd sipp.svn

Open ./sipp.svn/scenario.hpp and add this line

#include <limits.h>

after

#include <sys/socket.h>

save the file, and in the terminal do

$make

You're done ;-)

UPDATE : The latest unstable snapshot available from http://sipp.sourceforge.net/snapshots/sipp.2009-07-29.tar.gz does not have this problem and does not throw *segmentation fault* as sipp 3.1 does now on my ubuntu 10.04

New JBCP version is out : Happy New Year !!

Happy new year to all!

To celebrate the already started but still new year, the Mobicents team (special kudos to the QA and productization team) brings to our customers a little present, the commercially supported flavor of Mobicents called JBoss Communications Platform is now available in its 1.2.2 version on the JBoss Customer Support Portal, the release notes are here so go check it out !

I'll end this post by thanking my fellows on the Mobicents core team for the hard work to bring you the best Open Source Communications platform and our striving and ever growing community that is helping us out by using it, reporting bugs, contributing fixes and features,... wishing you all the best for the year to come and happy ne

Mobicents ALL 1.2.1.GA has been released !!

It's with intense pleasure that I forward here the news of our new aggregated release : Mobicents ALL 1.2.1.GA !

It's truly the most complete all integrated Platform out there (and it's open source !) for building next generation Telco and Convergent Applications. Nothing less nothing more. Usually vendors have one or two of the components we provide, but no one so far is able to offer all that we provide in Mobicents to your great pleasure...

Miscellaneous examples are :

• Location based services : when ever friends, family is in 2kms range from you, your phone beeps
• SMS based services : Vote for your Favorite Reality TV Show
• IVR (Interactive Voice Response) Based Service : Check your bank account balance through the phone
• Ring Back Tone
• Event Notification by Phone, SMS and IM : get a phone call to set the delivery date of your order or SMS every time your order changed of status (processing, payment confirmed, shipping)
• Conferencing : The Conference is integrated with your calendar and is calling you and the participants when it's time, no hassle on remembering the number to call, pin code, ... See
• IT System Monitoring : every time an alert is sent by the monitoring app, your converged application send an SMS, Instant Message, tweet or calls out the IT System team to take preventive actions (Press 1 to restart the server, press 2 to redeploy the application, or whatever)
• Web Integration for Convergence : Add a small widget so that the customer can be put in contact with the call center (through phone or chat) to help him get more information on the products he wants to buy.
• Banking : Stock Monitoring application that sends an SMS or calls you when the stock price goes over a user defined threshold and let you press the amount of options you want to sell or buy
• Customer Relationship Management : Ability to automatically answer status for support cases or record new leads, integration with leading online CRM providers
• PBX : Enabling businesses to use their managed intranet to help reduce long distance expenses, enjoy the benefits of a single network for voice and data. Example : Mobicents IPBX

The Sky is the Limit !

To build all those kind of applications and more, the following components provided in the Mobicents ALL release will do the job and should cover all your needs :

• Sip Servlets Container 1.0.GA : Aimed at building VoIP (SIP + Media interaction) and Converged Applications (SIP + HTTP/Java EE + Media interaction) with full HA capabilities
• Media Server 1.0.3.GA : competitive, complete, best-of-breed media gateway functionality featuring highest quality with following features : Announcement, IVR, Conferencing, Packet Relay and supporting all majors audio codecs and can be controlled remotely through MGCP or in VM
• JAIN SLEE Container 1.2.6.GA : Aimed at Telco and supporting multi protocols architectures in a standard and highly efficient way. Comes with following Resource Adaptors : SIP, SIP11 (JSR240 a.k.a. JAIN SLEE 1.1), Media, MGCP, JCC, XMPP, SMPP, HTTP Client, HTTP Servlet, Asterisk, Text to Speech, Rules, Diameter (Base, Cca, Rf, Ro, Sh-Client and Sh-Server), XCAP Client
• Mobicents Diameter 1.0.1.GA : Provides Authentication, Authorization and Accounting capabilities
• Mobicents SIP Presence Service 1.0.0.BETA5 : The Mobicents SIP Presence Service provides presence functionalities to SIP-based networks
• Mobicents SIP Load Balancer 1.0.0.BETA7 : provides Load Balancing and failover SIP capabilites for Mobicents servers in a clustered environment

If you want to get started, download the binary form SourceForge and read the release notes. We are waiting for your feedback on mobicents-public google group.

Have fun !

Mobicents/JBCP & JBoss World 2009

I'm back from JBoss World 2009 that took place in Chicago together with the RH summit and the event was again awesome this year !
First I have to admit that the weather in Chicago was perfect and it helped raise this city as one of the best I've been so far in the US : very good public transportation, great architecture, LOTS of cultural events, plenty of parks, beaches on the lakes, ...

Tuesday was kind of pre-Jboss World day, it was mainly registration and partner pavillion opening. Me & Vladimir were tending the booth with other JBoss people and checking the partners out.
We got to meet and finally put a face on a lot of JBoss colleagues and people from our community (I won't cite any company names, but they will recognize themselves :-) ) getting at the same time great feedback on Mobicents/JBCP and evangelizing.

On the next day, we had a great keynote from our CEO, Jim Whitehurst, here is a phrase I thought I'd never hear in a CEO's keynote : "if we all had to walk around naked, we'd all spend more time at the gym" which seems to define the open-source spirit pretty well to me :-)

Wednesday, I attended Bela Ban's talk on Large clusters which was really interesting and I would recommend everyone interested in HA to check it out.I got to talk to the Jopr (JBoss ON is the corresponding product) team and we got this idea of integrating Mobicents to send text messages or call phones with DTMF recognition whenever there is some alerts in the cluster so that the IT monitoring team using Jopr can take some action whenever there is a problem. A proof of concept should be available soon :-)

Then Vladimir had it's BOF on Rapid VoIP Development Environment - SIP Servlets 1.1 (JSR-289), SEAM Telco Framework, Ruby on Rails, Eclipse VoIP Tooling
Unfortunately, we were competing against another BOF about Seam & JSR-299 containing all the JBoss Rock stars : Dan Allen, Pete Muir, Gavin King, Emmanuel Bernard, Max Rydahl Andersen and special guests; so the attendance was a bit lower than we expected but the feedback from the audience was great and had so much interesting questions that we finally got kicked out of the room :-)

Thursday, I went to see the new JBoss project GateIn that has been announced which is the ExoPlatform/JBoss Portal joint project. Definitely Interesting stuff, their booth was packed all day long and the project and UI are very slick. Those guys were definitely interested in Mobicents as well to be able to send SMS from the portal or click to dial kind of portlet, ... so a another proof of concept should see the light soon here as well.

In the afternoon, I went to see the Web Beans and HornetQ (JBoss Messaging renamed) presentations which were both of great quality.

Finally, we went to the Museum of Science and Industry party sponsored by IBM which was a lot of fun and then did a bit of pub crawling, on which I won't reveal the dirty details :-)

The last day was actually half a day and I attended to Bob's Mc Wirther presentation on TorqueBox which was the best one I attended too.

My session was among the last ones which was not very convenient because a lot of people already left the conference (1/3 to half I would say) but the attendance to the session was still pretty good (around 30 people in the room) and the presentation was very well received with a lot of feedback and exchange with the audience once again.

To wrap up on JBoss World, I would say that this was a rather good success for Mobicents/JBCP, it was very well received with a lot of people baffled by the platform and how it grew up in a year.

I uploaded my presentation here

So Thanks for coming and for coming at us, talk to us we love that, meeting the community in person and we will make sure that next year will be even better :-)

Update : For more pictures from chicago, see here : http://picasaweb.google.com/jean.deruelle/Chicago2009#

Update 2 : List of all JBoss World presentations and videos

Mobicents 2009 Team Meeting in Brno

Hello fellas,

Last week was a big event for the Mobicents guys as we all got together in this beautiful city of Brno located in Czech Republic.

Everybody on the team gave an overview of what we did over the last year and the roadmaps ahead for the next year and I have to tell you that this is stunning how much has been achieved in a one year timeframe under the Red Hat :

• Mobicents Sip Servlets, Media Server, Diameter reaching 1.0 GA
• JAIN SLEE 1.1 Certification
• Frameworks : Seam Telco Framework, JRuby Integration with TorqueBox, ECharts For Sip Servlets
• Eclipse tooling with Sip Servlets and JAIN SLEE Plugins
• Sip Presence Service
• Initative by the Community to build IMS components on top of Mobicents

I'm really amazed to see at which pace is growing the Mobicents Platform and the community around it that is helping us out in an incredible number of ways from testing out the projects, interoperability to contributing code, ... that proves the value of open source, collaboration and sharing which are the core values of Red Hat and JBoss.

All of this to say "Thank You" to our beloved Mobicents Community.

I had 2 talks scheduled on Mobicents Sip Servlets :

• First, as I said above on the achievements, challenges and goals/roadmap which you can find here
• Second, on the HA plans and challenges not only for Sip Servlets but for JAIN SLEE as well so that we have a common architecture and frameworks for both our containers to ensure consistency and lower code duplication as much as possible.

As we move forward, we plan to continue investing and contributing to the NIST SIP Stack Reference Implementation of JAIN SIP Specification which is at the core of our projects (kudos to Ranga for being of great help whenever we need him). Those contributions will be mainly targeted at performance improvements, bug fixes, new features (lazy parsing, NIO, ...) and HA support.

It was great to understand what the other team members and other Mobicents projects have been up to and see their roadmaps and last but not the least, we got to have some fun to chill out a bit of the hard work of the day

so here is a part of the Mobicents team after work waiting to get into the action to go clubbing :

Silas and Eduardo showing the Mobicents Team winning the Beer Contest :

The Mobicents Team being teached by the local czech girls where the good places are in town

So Cheers guys !