Re: [Linphone-developers] Linphone.org SIP service - technical details

[Kristian Kielhofner]

Simon,

  I agree that choice an competition is important as long as there is
a logical reason for the split in development effort and resulting
fragmentation - different goals, direction, etc.

  I've used SER-family proxies for about seven years.  My largest
installation is about 100,000 business users across the internet.
I've been very, very happy with the flexibility and stability of the
various members of the SER family.  If anything I feel their
installation, configuration, and operation is too complex.  Unlike any
other network daemon I've seen, SERs require you to have detail
knowledge of the protocol in question (SIP).  While this isn't a
problem for me it can be a significant challenge for new users
attempting to configure a SIP proxy.  When was the last time Apache
httpd required someone to read the HTTP 1.1 spec just to serve a few
basic web pages?  This is what life is like using SER and I only
imagine it being more difficult for new users to represent their SIP
routing constructs in C++ (perhaps unless they already know C++).

  I was hoping this project would provide a powerful SIP proxy with a
simpler configuration method.  I feel there is room for this in the
Open Source world.  Absent that you see a lot of people trying to use
B2BUAs like FreeSWITCH or Asterisk as a "SIP Proxy" because they are
significantly easier to configure even if they aren't the right tool
for the job (SER is).  Something like Brekeke (only open source) would
be nice:

http://www.brekeke.com/sip/

  It's still a proxy (not as powerful as SER) but it's pretty easy to
configure via the web interface.

On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 11:44 AM, Simon Morlat
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Kristian,
>
> Indeed I was pretty sure that somebody will ask this question, though it
> finally came quicker than I thought :-)
>
> The answer is "why not ?"
>
> Indeed the SER/Kamailio/OpenSIPS has a very impressive feature list,
> however quite a few media-procesing related features. But the
> web/database ecosystem around it is very complete.
>
> SER/Kamailio/OpenSIPS is the only SIP open-source proxy product, I think
> it is always good to have a the choice, like ekiga and linphone for
> example.
>
> Before going further to the debate, I have one question for you: did you
> try already personaly to install and setup a SER/Kamailio/OpenSIPS by
> yourself to setup a SIP network on the public internet ? if yes what
> were your impressions ?
>
> Actually, some answers to this question we asked to several people
> around us lead us to the conclusion that there could be a strong need
> for another SIP proxy, based on different architures and concepts.
>
> SER/Kamailio/OpenSIPS is mostly script oriented (even the SIP routing
> and message processing logic is a script). For flexisip we thought that
> the best language for doing SIP processing is to use a real language,
> like C++, with perhaps java binding in the future. A real programming
> language provides strong syntax and type checking, thus less errors.
> One idea behind flexisip is: no scripts, just C++ code and interfaces,
> and extend flexsip with new features by writing a flexisip C++ module.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Simon

-- 
Kristian Kielhofner