eSAE: A rapid service creation environment for next-generation services

The telecommunications industry is entering a brave new world of communication where consumers are looking for new ways to stay connected. To keep up with the pace, service providers need a service creation environment (SCE) to rapidly develop, test, simulate, and deploy next-generation services including wireless data, voice, and Internet applications. Next-generation SCEs have to support a wide variety of network interfaces and protocols that allow network operators, application service providers (ASPs), and third-party developers to build, deploy, and manage such services. The Lucent Enhanced Services Authoring Environment (eSAE, pronounced "easy") has been developed as an enabler of converged services with speed-to-market mindset. Service developers without any specialized skills in proprietary languages can create most of the services quickly by using industry standard languages like Java, * C++, and XML. This paper will explore in detail how the eSAE architecture promotes reusability using JavaBeans* component technology and how the visual assembly paradigm eases service composition. Open network application programming interfaces (APIs) (for example, JTAPI, Fullcircle(TM), Parlay) can be incrementally supported for standards compliance. XML technology is leveraged for complete service specification (data modeling for call logic and service provisioning). (C) 2002 Lucent Technologies, Inc.