Feel like playing a mini golf game on your mobile phone against players in an online community? Then visit BEA’s booth in the JavaOne pavilion, where BEA and Ericsson are jointly demonstrating such a converged multimedia application developed with Ericsson’s Service Development Studio (SDS).

Abid Qureshi

At the booth, Abid Qureshi, developer in Ericsson’s SDS team, holds up his smartphone and starts the mini golf client. As it starts up, a list appears that shows the presence status of all his friends in the online mini golf community. On a desktop screen beside him, his own presence status appears on the mini golf buddy list of a mobile phone client emulator.

“In this application, I can start a chat or a real-time mini golf session with any of my friends, or if I don’t have any friends online, I can play with a random online member of the game community,” Qureshi says. “But you could easily add services such as Voice over IP (VoIP), video conferencing, or perhaps some dating application features to this application.”

Adding such features would be easy thanks to the SDS Eclipse plug-in, and thanks to the standardized IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) service enablers that are made available in SDS.

“IMS can be used to deliver rich multimedia services to your mobile phone, and SDS allows you to start trying out IMS application development and testing today,” Qureshi says. “In this demo application, IMS service enablers have been used to add a community-feel to the application with the help of the buddy list and presence functionality.”

The application runs on a BEA WebLogic SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) server (WLSS), which is fully compliant with the JSR-116 SIP Servlet API. However, Qureshi says that SDS can be used to develop and deploy server applications for any JSR-116 compliant SIP server.

“Many people were especially interested the client-side emulator of SDS and the uniqueness of SDS – a complete end-to-end Java programming environment for both developing and testing converged multimedia applications,” he says.

Qureshi says that one person also suggested an additional feature that he thought was quite interesting. In SDS, developers can view a real time graph of the SIP message flow between the clients and the SIP server. The suggested feature was to extend the SIP flow graph to also work as a sort of debugging tool that highlights where in the SIP message flow that errors occur.

“Perhaps this is a feature that we will see in a future release,” Qureshi says.

By Olle Blomberg

Ericsson Service Development Studio, SDS 4.0