Service Availability Forum Specifications for Supporting Java
By Magnus Karlson, SA Forum

Telecom application developers are increasingly adopting Java to speed development. This trend started in the service and content-centric areas, but there is no reason why it should stop there. An important question has been how to implement high availability for applications that include both C and Java. The idea is to ensure common orchestration and management since migration to a Java only environment will be gradual at best.

In response, Service Availability (SA) Forum, beginning with the 5.1 Java Mapping specification, has extended the latest major release (release 5 from October 2007) to simplify the integration of Java code into high availability clusters. Previously, the specifications offered only basic C functions, and Java developers had to create their own mappings. With Release 5.1, the SA Forum now provides a unified solution.

The new mapping offers access to SA Forum high availability functions for Java Standard Editions and more appropriate mappings for the Enterprise Edition. SA Forum white papers describe more broadly how to integrate services with Java functionality. This is also currently being developed within the Java community as a Specification Request, JSR-319 (Availability Management for Java), which is circulating as an early draft for review.

Java, especially the Enterprise Edition, has long supported functionality such as persistence, management functions, and containers to manage service availability. Today, developers are increasingly trying to leverage code written in traditional languages, while taking advantage of Java’s flexibility and speed. To date, such systems have used ad-hoc solutions for monitoring and orchestrating availability strategies. It is a challenge to provide unified management and operations interfaces so the system can be driven by a broad range of people rather than just a few specialists.

The SA Forum and Java community initiatives will ensure a common and complete, integrated and harmonized support and mapping of Java and C together in high availability clusters. This will bring clear advantages to the future development of service functionality in general, as well as to IMS and other telecom systems. Such systems currently use Java extensively, but still need to access existing functionality developed in other languages. Furthermore, other highly active industry areas including social and community networking initiatives are also often developed with sections written in both Java and other languages. These areas will be important in the future of telecom services.

The new SA Forum release includes Java mappings for availability management, cluster information and control functions, and notification and alarm functions. Future mapping specifications will enhance current functionality. They will generally be available at the same time as, or shortly following, major specification updates.

For more information on Java mappings (JNI mappings and Javadoc) and the SA Forum specifications, please refer to www.saforum.org/specification. Supporting white papers are at www.saforum.org/about/sa_forum_white_papers and JSR-319 http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=319.

Magnus Karlson is a Board Member for the Service Availability Forum. He is also a specialist in Expert Open Systems Software Architecture with Ericsson. You can reach him at magnus.karlson@ericsson.com.