IPTComm 2007 conference

2007-08-28T12:55:32Z

A paper on CONFIANCE and DCON has been recently presented at the IPTComm 2007 conference (Principles, Systems and Applications of IP Telecommunications) in New York. After the discussion of the paper, which described the scalability enhancements DCON can offer, a demo of the described work has been successfully arranged for all the interested attendees.
You can have a look at all the presented work (slides, proceedings, and a couple of videos as well) on the documentation page (http://confiance.sf.net/doc).

Installer script for CONFIANCE

2007-08-01T21:57:58Z

A user-friendly, interactive, installer script for CONFIANCE is now available.
It allows an automatic retrieval, compilation and installation of all the needed pieces of the framework (Asterisk, Minisip, BFCP, MSRP, Videomixers and both client and server side patches), without having to take care of each one separately. The script is interactive, which means you can choose what to compile and what not (for example if you've already installed a component).
You can get the gz-compressed script from the download page:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/confiance/confiance-installer-07.tar.gz?download

Just launch it and follow the instructions to build CONFIANCE.

Videomixing and continuous presence

2007-06-14T11:09:23Z

Exciting news in CONFIANCE!
The new release introduces support for video mixing and transcoding functionality, so that to provide continuous video presence in conferences. To do so, CONFIANCE can rely on two different videomixers:

* CONFIANCE VideoMixer, a work we're carrying on ourselves, and which you can get on the CONFIANCE homepage;
* Sergio Garcia Murillo's VideoMixer, an open source videomixer available on http://sip.fontventa.com/.

Both the videomixers are optional, and do not depend on each other. This means that you can choose to enable support for both, for only one, or for none if you're just interested in the already provided basic videoswitching. Instructions on how to enable support for the videomixer(s) are provided in the CONFIANCE installation guide.

Though both the videomixers are early works and in a beta stage, they both already work quite fine, and have support for a range of codecs. Specifically, the CONFIANCE VideoMixer currently provides:

* adaptive layouts according to how many active video sources are feeding the mix;
* continuous presence for up to 8 users (this can be easily enhanced by adding new layouts in the code);
* a static logo when no video sources are active;
* support for H.261, H.263 and H.263+ (QCIF only for the moment, and H.261 support is still quite buggy).

Currently, only one global layout is available for all users in the same conference: support for customized layouts will be added in the future. Any kind of feedback and/or comment/suggestion upon the current work will be more than welcome, and will help us enhancing its functionality.

To know more about the VideoMixer Sergio Garcia Murillo wrote, visit his website at http://sip.fontventa.com/, and follow the discussion on the Asterisk-video mailing list.

That said, you can get the updated release of CONFIANCE, which envisages support these VideoMixers, on the project download page:

* http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/confiance/confiance_wip_server-0.7.tar.gz?download, the server side of the platform;
* http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/confiance/confiance_wip_client-0.7.tar.gz?download, the client side of the platform;

and the CONFIANCE VideoMixer here:

* http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/confiance/confiance_videomixer-0.1.tar.gz?download.

To get Sergio Garcia Murillo's VideoMixer:

* svn co http://sip.fontventa.com/svn/mcu

You'll need xmlrpc-c 1.1 to compile it.

Papers, articles and conferences

2007-06-12T14:05:52Z

An article about DCON has been recently published on the March issue of the IEEE Communications Magazine:

A. Buono, S. Loreto, L. Miniero, S.P. Romano "A distributed IMS enabled conferencing architecture on top of a standard centralized conferencing framework", IEEE Communications Magazine vol.45, No 3, March 2007 (requires IEEE subscription or membership)

A demo of the DCON framework in action has also been successfully presented at the latest IEEE INFOCOM 2007 conference, the 26th Annual IEEE Conference on Computer Communications in Anchorage, Alaska. You can get the presented brochure from the Documentation page.

Coming to the future events, a paper on CONFIANCE and DCON has been accepted at the upcoming IPTComm 2007 conference (Principles, Systems and Applications of IP Telecommunications). Besides the discussion of the paper, which describes the scalability enhancements DCON can offer, a demo of the described work will be presented as well, so in case you're in New Work on the 19th and 20th June pay us a visit!

To conclude, a paper more focused on CONFIANCE has been accepted at the upcoming NEW2AN 2007 conference (The 7th International Conference on Next Generation Teletraffic and Wired/Wireless Advanced Networking). The paper will be presented ad discussed in September in St.Petersburg.

CONFIANCE with MSRP support released

2007-04-28T13:34:16Z

CONFIANCE version 0.6 has just been released:

* http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/confiance/confiance_wip_server-0.6.tar.gz?download, the server side of the platform;
* http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/confiance/confiance_wip_client-0.6.tar.gz?download, the client side of the platform.

Starting from this release, the stable 1.4.x versions of Asterisk will be used as a base, instead of the SVN one, to ease versioning, debugging and patching.

Besides, as already announced, BFCP has been made a separate library, which will then have to be installed before CONFIANCE.

Finally, CONFIANCE has been enriched with MSRP (Message Session Relay Protocol) chatroom functionality. MSRP, as BFCP, is an external library we wrote exploited by both client and server sides of CONFIANCE.

libBFCP and libMSRP projects opened

2007-04-16T09:07:56Z

The work on CONFIANCE is going on.
In the meanwhile, we've opened two new projects on Sourceforge. They host the libraries we implemented, and on which CONFIANCE relies to take advantage of their features, specifically:

* libBFCP (http://sourceforge.net/projects/libbfcp), the libraries implementing the BFCP (Binary Floor Control Protocol) stack;
* libMSRP (http://sourceforge.net/projects/libmsrp), the libraries implementing the MSRP (Message Session Relay Protocol) stack, which is currently being integrated within CONFIANCE to add chatroom functionality to XCON conferences.

Both the libraries are open source (GPL license), so you're encouraged to use them in your projects if you find them useful.
Any feedback upon them will be more than welcome.

BFCP over TLS support and more enhancements

2007-03-07T10:29:53Z

A new update on CONFIANCE is available on the project download page:

* http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/confiance/confiance_wip_server-0.5.tar.gz?download, the server side of the platform;
* http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/confiance/confiance_wip_client-0.5.tar.gz?download, the client side of the platform.

Minor updates include several bugfixes, a verbose debug level to optionally limit the amount of console notifications about what's happening, and enhancements upon the XCON/DCON integration support.

As a new feature, instead, videoswitching has been made available for basic MeetMe conferences as well, and not only for XCON/DCON conferences. However, since in MeetMe conferences the video source switching cannot be accomplished by means of the BFCP way of coordinating access to resources, it can currently be realized only using a new dedicated console command, 'videoswitch', as a proof-of-concept. Checkout our mail on the Asterisk-video mailing list for more details upon the feature (http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-video/2007-January/000389.html).

Finally, as a major enhancement upon the previous version of the platform, the whole BFCP stack (both message processing and behaviour layers) has been refined, fixed and, most importantly, enriched with support for BFCP over TLS as stated in the RFC4582. However, support for BFCP over TLS has to be explicitely enabled and appropriately configured in the CONFIANCE configuration file in order to work properly, since by default the Floor Control Server will keep on exploiting simple TCP connections for BFCP communication. No configuration is needed on the client side, since the appropriate transport method for TCP will be automatically exploited consequently to SIP/SDP negotiation with the focus.

The standalone BFCP updated libraries can be obtained as usual on the project download page:

* http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/confiance/confiance-v7bfcp-only-05.tar.gz?download.

To compile this version of the libraries for Windows you'll not only need the Win32 porting of the Pthreads, which you can get on the official page (http://sourceware.org/pthreads-win32/), but also the Win32 porting of OpenSSL, which is needed for BFCP over TLS support: you can get it on the Win32 OpenSSL Installation Project (http://www.slproweb.com/products/Win32OpenSSL.html) or compile it yourself out of the code on the official page (http://www.openssl.org/).

Updates, Win32 porting and Java bindings for the BFCP

2007-01-31T10:08:44Z

After some weeks of silence, we can finally provide you with many interesting news.
The SVN branch containing our server-side addons for Asterisk has changed location, which means that from now on you'll have to change the address to access it:

* svn co http://svn.digium.com/svn/asterisk/team/group/xcon_bfcp

The updates upon the Work in Progress version of our platform are as usual available on the project download page:

* confiance_wip_server-0.4.tar.gz, the server side of the platform;
* confiance_wip_client-0.4.tar.gz, the client side of the platform.

Besides fixing some issues that have been found, the most notable update on the platform is its integration with another project we're carrying on, Distributed Conferencing (DCON). DCON enables the distribution of XCON conferences transparently to users, by means of appropriate information spreading and protocols dispatching. Checkout the related page on Sourceforge for more details (http://dcon.sourceforge.net/), as documentation, slides and IETF drafts.

Finally, a Win32 porting of the BFCP libraries has been made available. The libraries have been tested with MingW, but should work fine with any other compiler. Besides, Java bindings for both Linux- and Windows-based systems have been made available as well, through a Java Native Interface (JNI) (thanks to Amato Sorrentino for that). You can get both the packages on the project download page:

* confiance-v7bfcp-only-04.tar.gz, the C libraries;
* confiance-v7bfcp-only-04-JNI.zip, the Java bindings for the libraries.

To compile the libraries for Windows you'll need the Win32 portings of the Pthreads, which you can get on the official page (http://sourceware.org/pthreads-win32/). Please note that both the portings are experimental and not fully tested yet, so please let us know if you meet any strange behaviour when using them.

That's all for now, let us know what you think about the work made on the platform so far. If you encounter any problem using it or installing it, feel free to contact us. As usual, any comment, feedback and suggestion will be more than welcome.

Web Service module for CONFIANCE and IETF 67th Meeting

2006-11-20T16:52:04Z

A new package (confiance_wip_webservice-03.zip) has been made available in the CONFIANCE project: it is a set of web applications which enables you to interact with the CONFIANCE framework through the web, using a WebService-based approach. For more information on the architecture and the implementation details, checkout the documentation in the package, and feel free to contact us if you need more clearance or are interested in the work.

Besides, the whole CONFIANCE framework, comprising the Web Service interface as well, has been recently presented at the latest IETF XCON WG Meeting in San Diego, mainly as a demonstration of the Binary Floor Control Protocol in action. You can get:
* the minutes of the meeting, http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/06nov/minutes/xcon.txt
* the slides presented before the actual demo, http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/06nov/slides/xcon-1.ppt
An audio recording of the whole presentation of the slides and demontration of CONFIANCE will be made available soon on this page, together with some photos of the event.

News upon CONFIANCE

2006-11-06T19:35:16Z

After some weeks of silence, we can finally provide you with many interesting news.
First of all, the WIP on Confiance has gone on despite the lack of updates on the site, and is now quite stable. Besides, a separate branch containing our server-side addons for Asterisk has been made available (many thanks to Russell for that), which means you can access it via SVN to always get up-do-date revisions:

* svn co http://svn.digium.com/svn/asterisk/team/russell/xcon_bfcp

A patch to the main trunk of Asterisk is available anyway, in case you prefer manually applying it.
The updates upon the Work in Progress version of our platform are as usual available in the project download page:

* confiance_wip_server-0.3.tar.gz, the server side of the platform;
* confiance_wip_client-0.3.tar.gz, the client side of the platform.

Besides fixing some issues that have been found, we enhanced the Conference Session Management protocol (XconScheduler) with some functionality, the most important being the newly introduced use of Blueprints and Templates (which can be used to create new conferences out of default settings) and the possibility for the user to set a Subject for the conferences she/he might want to create. Finally, great work has been done so far to integrate the Focus (Asterisk) with a WebServices-enabled conference session management protocol: the work is in a very advanced state, and news on it will soon be published on this page, so come back soon for updates.

About the client side, Minisip's GUI has been enhanced and made clearer, by placing BFCP management graphical interfaces in a separate window. Furthermore, to take advantage of the newly introduced functionality provided by the Focus, new methods have been added to the protocol:

* QueryBlueprints and QueryTemplates, to access the available Blueprints and Templates offered by the conferencing system, and eventually use them to create new conferences;
* QueryUsers, to get the list of all users currently participating to a conference.

All the methods have an "alias" in the Asterisk Manager Interface too, to allow asynchronous events notifications.

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