Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is one of the most critical areas of the IT world. Large organizations often use multi-vendor products and it is more likely for them to encounter integration problems, especially when it comes to integrating the different runtime environments for different programming languages and development platforms.

The service layer can be seen as a “marketplace” environment where telecom and IT players join with content and service providers to create and deliver services that provide value for enterprises and consumers. Parlay www.parlay.org is an open standard that defines a technology-independent API and a common protocol for a telecom service layer for mobile internet applications. Ericsson provides a service enabler called Network Resource Gateway, which is Ericsson's Parlay gateway for the open standard Parlay API and protocol. Network Resource Gateway provides a common interface to its clients and translates calls to the particular server; for example, SMSC server for SMS and MPS system for a positioning request and so on. Developers interact with Network Resource Gateway through an application-programming interface called Network Resource Gateway SDK to create the telecom applications. The Network Resource Gateway Parlay API is written in Java, because Java is a common choice today for building distributed business applications, especially for mobile internet, both server-side J2EE and mobile client-side with J2ME. Undoubtedly, another major development platform is .Net platform from Microsoft, which is Microsoft's solution for building desktops, as well as distributed applications.

To demonstrate the potential for building telecom applications on the .Net platform using the Network Resource Gateway Parlay API, we conducted a case study using the JNBridge tool. We published the result of our study in a development kit called ParlayOnDotNetCDK in October, 2004. The ParlayOnDotNetCDK used JNBridge version 2.0 with TCP based remoting of .Net architecture for communication between Java side and .Net side of the application. This time we are releasing the second and more efficient version of CDK, which is using JNBridge version 2.2 with shared memory mechanism to enable the .Net application to instantiate the Java virtual machine in the same Windows process to achieve better performance. We have named this kit ParlayOnDotNetCDK1.1.

ParlayOnDotNetCDK1.1 includes the sample application built in the .Net platform using Network Resource Gateway Parlay API from Ericsson. The CDK helps the developer community by providing a step-by-step guide for building telecom applications using two state-of-the-art development platforms, Java and .Net platform using JNBridge, in a more efficient way.

The CDK contains the following parts:

• Sample MMS application with complete source code, configuration files, compilation scripts and code comments.           
• Architecture description with use cases, architecture diagram and sequence diagrams.           
• Getting started guide.           
• Performance issues.           
• Overview of other bridging solutions.           
• Working with JNBridge

To build and run the application you need to make sure the following things are installed on your computer.

• Microsoft Windows 2000 Server or Professional with Internet Information Server.           
• Any WAP browser from Sony Ericsson, Nokia or Opera, and so on.           
• Microsoft .Net Framework SDK 1.1           
• J2SE 1.4 or later, www.java.sun.com/j2se           
• Trial Version of JNBridge Pro SE (Standard Edition), version 2.2.          
• Ericsson's Network Resource Gateway SDK version RA406.          
• Any web browser

Note: The sample application has been tested on Microsoft Windows 2000 Server and Professional with Service Pack 4.

By Rehman Adil
Ericsson Mobility World