JAIN SLEE and OSA/Parlay

Abstract

There are two commonly held views within the industry concerning JAIN SLEE and OSA/Parlay. Both commonly held views have merit when considering different applications with particular business requirements. Here both views are described, and the reader is left to decide for themselves where it is appropriate to use JAIN SLEE and OSA/Parlay.

For background information on OSA/Parlay please refer to the Parlay group website.

JAIN SLEE and OSA/Parlay are complementary technologies

JAIN SLEE provides the application environment for OSA/Parlay applications. The OSA/Parlay gateway and SCFs are Resources from the JAIN SLEE perspective. The JAIN SLEE has Resource Adaptors installed that present an API to the application running in JAIN SLEE. This API then talks via a protocol to the gateway and SCF implementation. The OSA/Parlay implementation provides network integration.

OSA/Parlay does not define an application environment and JAIN SLEE does. JAIN SLEE does not define network connectivity and OSA/Parlay does. Therefore they are not competing technologies and in fact both are enhanced by the other.

The application is abstracted from the details of network protocols as it uses high level abstracted APIs that are derived from the Parlay UML specifications.

JAIN SLEE is suitable for mass market applications

JAIN SLEE in conjunction with a Resource Adaptor provides an application environment as well as network integration. Many applications are not going to execute in the third-party provider domain, as there is little incentive for a Network Operator to 'hand out' this business to another company. For applications where there is no third-party service provider involved the Resource Adaptor used to provide network integration should go directly to the network element that is used. The API that the Resource Adaptor exposes should be a Java standard API. For call control applications this API is Java Call Control (a high level abstracted API for managing calls). This approach is the same architecture as is used for the Intelligent Network/Advanced Intelligent Network.

The application is abstracted from the details of network protocols as it uses Java Call Control. Applications are portable across implementations as JAIN SLEE and JCC are APIs produced under the Java Community Process. There are more technical advantages than OSA/Parlay provides and there are architecture and performance benefits.