JAIN SLEE, the development platform for the telecommunications industry
What is it and what’s it for?
Java Service Logic Execution Environment (JSLEE) is also known as JAIN SLEE due to its origin under the software framework JAIN.
Service Logic Execution Environment (SLEE) is a well know concept in the telecommunications industry. A SLEE is a low latency, high performance service execution environment, asynchronous and event driven. JSLEE is the Java standard for SLEE.
The last specification was standardized by Sun Microsystems and OpenCloud in 2008. Several JSLEE implementations have been made since then, such as the original commercial implementation by Mataswitch/Rhino and Telestax’s excellent GPL variant
Telecommunications Operators
Telecommunications operators use complex legacy infrastructure rife with protocols designed for the transportation and distribution of data and media content in highly varied and complex topologies based on the Signaling System 7 (SS7) family of protocols. This is the worthy predecessor of today’s Internet (TCP/IP).
These operators have an invaluable tool when facing all the challenges in their current battle for the deployment of services in the internet cloud, enabling them to monetize their services and accelerate this deployment without giving up high availability standards (99.997%), scalability (millions of users in clusters) and the concurrency of thousands of transactions per second (TPS).
Adoption
A segment of the industry argues over JSLEE’s lacks when it comes to providing high level language development tools (Jasvascript/PHP, etc.) for the implementation of applications that consume these services. Also concerning is the scarcity of qualified human resources able to develop applications in JSLEE containers.
Despite this, from my point of view a part of the arguments are based on expectations unrelated to the JSLEE platform itself. The focus of this platform is to deploy services that can be consumed from other applications developed in any chosen language or WS/REST technique.
Conclusion
The current telecommunications industry scenario is a process of increasing convergence that demands the deployment of cloud services able to produce and consume multimedia and data services, interacting in coordination with a myriad of mixed services demanded by end users. For example, messaging services, VoIP, transaction or control services (IOT).
JSLEE technology together with the articulation of Java SIP Servlets undoubtedly opens the door to increasing the offer of cloud services to telecommunication operators, i.e., mobile, land line and virtual operators willing to take on the challenges of the new digital era.