Voxeo Developers Corner

This is the simplest application on Voxeo Prism.

The content of the application is like the following

myapp
  |-- WEB-INF

That’s it!

Simply copying the myapp.war to <prism>/apps directory. The container will automatically detect that and load it up. When it loads myapp up, it will unpack the WAR into <prism>/apps/myapp directory.

Of course, this simplest application doesn’t do anything. Since Voxeo Prism is a converged SIP application server, it can handle both SIP and HTTP. The easiest way to make this application do something is to add an index.html page, as the following.

myapp
  |-- WEB-INF
  |-- index.html

You can simply create an index.html with your favorite text editor and copy it under <prism>/apps/myapp directory.

Here is what I put in my index.html

Hello, welcome to My Application!

And here is what I will see when I open http://localhost:8080/myapp

Try it out.

Remember when we were talking about iNum “global phone numbers” back in late 2008? Remember the video interview I did with Voxbone CEO Rod Ullens about iNum? Have you wondered what the “iNum” number is that is assigned to every Evolution and Tropo application? Have you read the iNum page on Evolution and wondered how you could best use an iNum?

On this coming Friday, January 21th, at 12 noon US Eastern time, the VoIP Users Conference crew will gather on their weekly conference call to get an updated from Voxbone on the status of the iNum initiative. From the VUC page:

Hugh Goldstein, Director of iNum Business Development will share current information and plans for 2011 and how VoIP users can leverage and support the iNum initiative in their own businesses and as individuals. Note that iNum supports voice, SMS and advanced multi-media services

More info about the call is at:

http://www.voipusersconference.org/2011/inum-voxbone-2/

Info about how to join the conference call is available on the VUC site, but can be summarized as:

• SIP: sip:200901@login.zipdx.com
• Skype: vuc.me
• PSTN: +1 567 252 2286
• iNum: +883 5100 123 94882

There is also an active IRC backchannel during the call (#vuc on freenode).

If you’re interested in iNum and our evolving global IP infrastructure it should be a fun and informative call. If you can’t attend, the call will be recorded for later listening and will be found on the episode web page.

With the start of 2011, have you tried out our VoiceObjects Application Lifecycle Suite lately? VoiceObjects provides an easy-to-use graphical environment inside the industry-standard Eclipse IDE. It provide real-time analytics about how people are using your application, can integrate with leading Business Intelligence (BI) systems, can work with many different media platforms (not just Voxeo’s), and can create applications that can work in multiple channels including voice, SMS, IM, mobile web, Twitter and USSD. One development environment, one set of logs and analytics, many different communication channels.

If you would like to try out VoiceObjects on your Windows or Mac system, simply go to our VoiceObjects Developer Portal at:

http://developers.voiceobjects.com

And download either (or both) of the two available releases:

• VoiceObjects Desktop for Eclipse (DfE) Developer Edition 9.1 for Windows and Mac
• EARLY ACCESS: VoiceObjects DfE 10 with VoiceObjects On-Demand

The developer portal also has tutorials, archived versions of webinars and many other tools and tips to help you get started.

With the new year, how about trying a new tool? What are you waiting for?

Do you want to learn more about VoiceXML? Would you like to view tutorials, sample applications and a comprehensive reference?

If so, just remember this one very simple address:

vxml.org

That’s it! One simple URL that will get you tons of information about VoiceXML, including tutorials and sample applications you can use to get started today!

Virtual number with Find-Me and Follow-Me service is getting popular. The idea is you can give your friends and family a virtual number. Then you can register multiple phones, such as your cellphone, home phone, and work phone, to that virtual number. When people call your virtual number, the virtual number can ring your registered phones either one by one — Follow Me — or all at the same time — Find Me — until you pick up one of them.

In SIP world, your SIP address, e.g. sip:wchen@voxeo.com, essentially is the virtual number. You can register multiple SIP phones to your SIP address. To Find Me, simply proxy the call to all the registered addresses in parallel. To Follow Me, simply proxy the call to all the registered addresses sequentially.

In the Using SIP Servlet to implement SIP Registrar and Proxy Server blog, I described how registration and proxy works. With SIP Servlet, adding Find-Me and Follow-Me is trivial.

The following code was shown in that blog to demonstrate how SIP proxy works.

  @Override
  protected void doInvite(SipServletRequest req) throws ServletException, IOException {
    // application only has to worry about forwarding the initial request.
    // the rest is taken care by the container.
    if (req.isInitial()) {
      URI callee = req.getTo().getURI();
      Proxy proxy = req.getProxy();

      //let's see if the Location Service has bindings for this callee.
      List<URI> targets = _locator.getContacts(callee);
      if (targets.size() > 0) {
        // The Proxy Server should stay on the signaling path
        proxy.setRecordRoute(true);

        // Let the container handles all the 3xx redirect automatically
        proxy.setRecurse(true);

        // Try all the registered phones for this callee sequentially
        proxy.setParallel(false);

        //Yes, let's proxy the call to the registered phones.
        proxy.proxyTo(targets);
      }
      else {
        // Oops, no phone is registered right now. Let's do our best.
        proxy.proxyTo(callee);
      }
    }

When you have multiple phones registered, the above code essentially provides Follow-Me.

You can change one line — #19 –  to make this become Find-Me.

        proxy.setParallel(true);

What if you want to provide a PSTN virtual number and register PSTN numbers? SIP Servlet can work with either SIP URI and Telephone URL. So there is no difference as far as proxy code concerns. What you need is to connect the platform to a VoIP provider that can provide SIP-PSTN connectivity. In the future blog, I will show you how to configure Voxeo Prism to provide PSTN connectivity.

Are you testing out “next generation networks”? Are you trying out the many VoIP softphones that are out there? Are you working with SIP-based systems? Do you have a SIP-based IP phone on your desk, laptop or mobile phone?

If so, did you know that you can call any application in the Voxeo cloud using a SIP address? Try it out:

sip:9991450962@sip.voxeo.net

If you are using our Evolution Developer Portal, in the Application Manager you can see the SIP address on the “Contact Methods” tab for each application:

If you are using our Tropo service, the SIP address appears as part of the application information:

It’s literally that easy!

Enter that SIP address into a softphone or hard phone that supports SIP… and you’re good to go!

Back in 2000 when the Voxeo platform was launched, we made a bet that the SIP protocol would be the industry standard and 10+ years later that turned out to be a smart choice… we’ve got a giant SIP cloud sitting out there on the Internet… and it’s simple for you to make use of it!

By the way, if you would like to start building apps that communicate over SIP yourself, it’s easy to get started as developer accounts are free on both Evolution and Tropo!

With the start of a new year, how about starting it out with a new download? Want to build a outbound notification system? Or a conferencing system? Or a traditional interactive voice response (IVR) system? Want to hook up an IVR to a SIP-based system entirely using SIP? Or just want to play with VoiceXML, CCXML or CallXML as new languages to learn?

Whatever the case… you can download a free copy of Prophecy 10 for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X, simply by going to:

www.voxeo.com/prophecy

Download it on multiple platforms… try it out.. build sample apps… build production apps… build whatever you want. The cool part is that Prophecy is the same app platform running in our Prophecy Hosting environment. So you can build your app on your premise using Prophecy installed locally… and then deploy that app up into our hosted cloud… or keep it on your premise… or do both. (It doesn’t matter to us! Whatever works best for you.)

Give it a try! And if you run into any issues getting Prophecy set up… our support team is always standing by at support@voxeo.com, 24X7, 365 days a year… just waiting to help! (And via LiveChat and phone, too…)