A new application server to power rich and continuously available telecom services is being developed in Sun Microsystem’s GlassFish open-source community. One year after the launch of Project SailFin, Sreeram Duvur, principal engineer at Sun, tells us what SailFin means to developers and to the telecommunication industry.

The SailFin open-source project was announced last year at JavaOne. The goal of the project is to develop a communication application server based on the Java Enterprise Edition (EE) and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) open standards. The foundation of the server was the donation of Ericsson’s standards-based SIP Servlet 1.0 application server to the java.net community. Now, one year later, the Project SailFin community is the fourth most active project on java.net, with over 180 members, including 45 developers. Contributors from Sun, Ericsson, and leading telecommunications infrastructure companies, startups, researchers and individuals make a vibrant community.

“Using SailFin, services developers can take advantage of all Java EE services and APIs and in addition, the SIP servlet APIs specified in JSR 116 and 289 to develop scalable and portable applications,” Duvur says. “Support for services development is provided in NetBeans to develop converged communications-enabled web and enterprise applications. Ericsson’s Service Development Studio is another great integrated development environment (IDE) for end-to-end development and testing of converged applications.”

According to Duvur, these tools and the Java EE platform make for shorter development times. New services can be easily composed from existing ones or published for other developers to reuse, in unpredictable and new ways.

A communication application server must operate reliably in a very demanding environment, according to Duvur. Call handling is very sensitive to latency, and it must be resilient to network and infrastructure failures and guarantee high throughput. The ability to handle scale is also important because carriers often want to aggregate millions of subscribers on a single application server deployment. Project SailFin extends GlassFish Application Server to provide a highly scalable and reliable execution environment, Duvur says. Such an environment enables carriers and services developers to focus on monetization and creation of interesting services, without having to worry about how scaling and reliability is achieved.

Duvur says that the telecommunication industry will continue its convergence with IT. Future communication services will probably run on open standardized platforms that have been extended with special telecommunication features. Today’s enterprises need to interact with millions of global customers.

“Traditionally, telcos developed their own proprietary platforms and APIs, which have failed to attract large developer communities,” Duvur says. “Hence the development of new services has progressed slowly. Now, with competition from the internet world, carriers are under a lot of pressure to create new services and to launch them to market quickly.”

Choosing a platform that is open, standardized and an active community of users and developers ensures that it will stay around for a long time, Duvur says, and it lowers service development costs.

“An open and standardized platform is also beneficial to independent software vendors, who will find it easier to sell their applications to several operators.”

Openness may also bring benefits to another important player in the communication ecosystem of the future, namely the end user.

“On the internet, users are increasingly willing to do causal development and customize services, and I think we will see a similar trend in the mobile world,” Duvur says. “For example, a location-based service notifies your selected friends when you are in a certain area, respecting user privacy controls. You can compose it with a service that checks a shared calendar to see if your friend is busy or not and send an invitation to meet up. You need a platform that allows these services to be accessed and composed with fine grained access control. With Java EE and layered services, this kind of composition is easy to do.”

For Sun, open source product development like that being carried out within Project SailFin is how all software is developed these days, and Duvur says that it makes perfect business sense too.

“If an open source project doesn’t attract an active user community quickly, then it is unlikely that it will be a successful product,” he says. “With a large and engaged community, you are bound to get a variety of users who validate the product, test it and help improve it. Some of these users end up embracing the technology seriously, making it critical to their business success. These committed customers are often willing to pay for things like global support, prioritized service and new features suited to their specific needs. This is the underlying business model for Project SailFin. Open source allows us to reach the big carriers as well as that innovative developer in any corner of the world that we may not reach otherwise.”


Olle Blomberg

Project SailFin
GlassFish community
Ericsson Service Development Studio, SDS 4.0