Ericsson Uses NetBeans and Java Technology to Support Developers Building Service-Layer Apllications for Telecom Operators

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Ericsson is an industry-leading provider of telecommunications equipment and related services to mobile and fixed network operators around the globe. More than 1,000 networks in 140 countries depend on Ericsson network equipment, and 40 percent of all mobile calls are made through the company's systems. Ericsson is one of the few companies in the world that can offer end-to-end solutions for all major mobile communication standards. The firm's headquarters are in Stockholm, Sweden.

Ericsson's developer community is served by the Ericsson Mobility World Developer Program, which assists developers in successfully planning, developing, verifying, and delivering end-to-end solutions to operators and customers. This community aims to help developers "fill the mobile Internet with irresistible content."

A global network of regional centers encourage rapid creation and market deployment of mobile Internet applications and services. This open, industry-wide initiative brings together all the various players - operators, content and service providers, enterprises, and developers - to increase revenue through new mobile services.

The program offers practical development solutions, tutorial kits, SDK, CDK, and information and services such as testing and verification services, developer support, business and technical training, newsletters, live educational events, and application competitions.

Ericsson is using Java platform technology, both Java ME and Java EE, because of its popularity in the telecommunications market, its platform independence and its proven stability. Ericsson's developer teams strive to support a range of integrated development environments (IDEs), selecting the best IDE for specific projects. One team recently used the NetBeans IDE to build the Parlay X JAX-WS kit. Parlay X web services is a set of standardized services that provides developers with high-level interface access to the telecom functionality available in an operator's domain.

Jörgen Odgaard, manager of the Ericsson Mobility World Developer Program, explains that his team works with developers who are building applications for the service layer. These applications are targeted to the operator community, which views them as vehicles for generating new revenue streams.

For these service-layer applications, the Java platform is a de facto standard in operators' environments. Operators have come to rely on Java EE as the foundation for server-side components, which typically provide much of the power and business logic of a mobile application. Java EE in turn integrates smoothly with mobile browsing and Java ME, which is the platform most commonly used by handset manufacturers.

"To target developers, Java technology's platform independence is important," says Peter Yeung, the Chief Strategist, Service Creation, of the Ericsson Mobility World Developer Program. "Because many IT vendors support this standard, developers have the confidence that even if they change technology vendors, the application will still be compatible."

In addition, Odgaard explains that a number of key enabling technologies are built in Java technology, like Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), which lets multimedia users send and receive messages, and IP multimedia subsystem (IMS), which enables convergence of data, speech, and network technology over an IP-based infrastructure. As a result, integrating these essential technologies into an application is much easier.

In addition to helping developers with specific services and new technologies, Ericsson provides them with access to a marketing channel. Developers submit their applications for validation, and once they've been tested by Ericsson, they are accepted for inclusion in the company's application catalog.

"We typically get requests from operators to find applications in a certain segment," says Odgaard. "So we recommend third-party applications from our partner portfolio. That's why working with Ericsson provides a great business opportunity for developers."

Among its many services, Ericsson provides tutorial kits and development solutions to help developers get started with new technologies. For example, Ericsson recently developed a web services kit on the Parlay X standard, which is defined by the Parlay Group, a consortium of IT vendors, network operators, and telecom vendors, including Ericsson.

Yeung, who specified the requirements for the Parlay X kit, explains that the team selected NetBeans for the development effort for its integrated support for Java SE and Java EE, with full support of customized Ant script-based development. The team also took advantage of the NetBeans Enterprise Pack, which is designed to simplify writing, testing, and debugging services-based applications using XML, BPEL, and Java web services.

The pack provides visual design tools for UML modeling, XML schema creation, modification, and visualization, and BPEL-based web service orchestration to make it easier to develop and maintain applications based on the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). All the runtimes required to develop these composite applications are included.

Yeung says that the convenience of having all of this functionality in one download of the Enterprise Pack bundle is a real plus. By contrast, other IDEs, rely on multiple plug-ins for some of the functionality, and in some cases, these don't work well together.

"Having to deal with a collection of third-party plug-ins is simply not as convenient, especially for mobile development, where there are already a lot of dependencies on the telecom side," he says. "Also, the NetBeans IDE has no proprietary components. Everything works in a standardized Java EE environment, so you have guaranteed compatibility."

Ericsson's Parlay X JAX-WS kit, developed using NetBeans, enables developers to build a Parlay X application quickly using the Java API for XML Web Services. JAX-WS is a standard package that comes bundled with Sun's Java Web Services Developer Pack 2.0. JWSDP 2.0 is one of the leading reference implementations for creating web service applications; it's also freeware.

The Parlay X kit gives developers step-by-step instructions on how to perform tasks such as developing a simple SMS use case, using Parlay X services exposed by any service provider or network operator. The Parlay X web services also support multimedia messaging, call-control capabilities, terminal location and status, and so on, by way of standards-based services designed to provide seamless access to this functionality in operator applications.

In addition to the Parlay X kit, Ericsson has built other Java EE-based reference implementations using the NetBeans IDE.