Parlay Group

Parlay is a programming interface for telephone networks.

Survey

The industry consortium Parlay Group was founded with the objective of the specification of application programming interfaces ( APIs) that unify and simplify access to and control of any telephone network 1998. In this case, an abstraction is sought by the underlying hardware and network technology: The control of a call in the fixed network and a mobile network, for example, mapped to the same Parlay functions.

The aim is to develop IN services easier - an IN - installation should be carried out not only by highly qualified phone experts of the system operator or a hardware provider, but also by outsiders and software houses, so as to create value-added services faster and more cost effective.

Keep up the telephone networks and the Internet are better connected - to new services and offers by the merger enrich the business with value-added services. An example of this would click to dial - a service that automatically establishes a phone connection with a single click on a web page. Another example would be a service that locates lost the cell phone of a user and display the current location on a map in a web page. This effect is known in technical circles as the convergence of telephone and IP networks.

Relationship to other standards and organizations

The Parlay Group works closely with the ETSI and 3GPP. The Parlay specification is published by all three organizations. Within the 3GPP, the Parlay specification is part of the Open Service Access architecture and is therefore also known as Parlay / OSA.

Technical Background

The architecture is described by the Parlay / OSA specifications, is divided into three major groups:

• Service Capability Features (SCF ) - these are the points of intersection with the network functionality of the telephone network. They allow you, for example, to initiate a call to control and stop or play an announcement.
• Framework - provides basic mechanisms such as the identification and authorization of applications over the SCFs and allows applications to use these SCFs. Furthermore, the framework should enable interoperability between SCFs from different vendors and applications.
• Applications - applications that run on most in a specific application server. You implement the logic of value-added services and use by the SCFs the services of the telephone network.

The Parlay / OSA specification describes the interfaces between these components. Not described in detail in the specification, but is provided as part of the overall architecture, tools and interfaces for the administration of the framework, the SCFs and their applications.

All Service Capability Features and Framework of a provider are collectively referred to as Parlay gateway.

All Parlay / OSA interfaces are defined in IDL for CORBA. This allows for a language-independent implementation of the various parts. So can be programmed, for example, some of SCFs in C , while the applications have been implemented in Java.

ParlayX

Since 2003, some interfaces in the description language for web services ( WSDL ) be specified and designated as ParlayX. ParlayX defines a set of functions that do not exist in the IDL interfaces defined, such as sending a text message. Also pictures of previous Parlay / OSA were defined interfaces to web services.

ParlayX is not to be regarded as the successor to the IDL version of the Parlay / OSA definition. Both branches of the Parlay standards are developed. So currently there is the Parlay / OSA API in version 5.0, version 6 exists as a draft. ParlayX is currently in version 2.1, the successor versions 2.2 and 3.0 are planned.