If you noticed that it's been a little quiet on the new Safi releases front, here's why:  Over the past few months we've been working on integrating SafiServer with Servicemix, the popular SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) platform by Apache.  Our goal is to expose many of the powerful features of ServiceMix to Saflet developers including integrations with SNMP, email, JMS (Java Messaging Service), job scheduling, Web Services, file i/o, HTTP and TCP sockets, and many other technologies.  ServiceMix 4 also provides a modular framework (OSGI-based) allowing functionality of SafiServer to be updated or extended on the fly in a more fundamental way than is possible with the current SafiServer update mechanism, all with minimal disruption of service.  ServiceMix includes a comprehensive management API that, once integrated, will provide the SafiServer administrator with a detailed view of the system, from the very high level down to individual components. 

So what does this mean to you?  One nice new piece of functionality enabled directly by the new ServiceMix integration is the Web Service-based remote Saflet invocation.  The SafiServer now hosts a Web Service (http://localhost:9090/safletInvokerPort?wsdl by default) that exposes an operation allowing Saflets to be invoked with full support for input and output parameters.  This is an incredibly powerful feature and documentation and examples will be available on the Safi Systems website in the near future. 

Other than that, SafiWorkshop/SafiServer users shouldn't see too much evidence of this new architecture.  The real payoff of this integration effort will become apparent when we're able to leverage the power of ServiceMix in the form of new ActionSteps and SafiServer services, expanding the capabilities of the SafiServer beyond the world of telephony and further into the larger realm of the modern enterprise.  This release represents the first step in that direction and consequently this is a Beta release.  However, SafiServer/SafiWorkshop users will be happy to learn that many bug fixes and enhancements have been included as well.

Download Beta Versions Here

• Improvements/Enhancements

• Saflet Invocation via Web Services
• Standalone Custom Initiator Client for invoking Saflets remotely
• under the hood uses aforementioned Web Service Saflet Invocation
  
• "Stateless" Saflets
• All Saflets are now stateless reducing memory overhead and Saflet invocation latency.
  
• New Manager API ActionStep
• Exposes complete AMI (Asterisk Manager Interface) API
• Useful for special cases where no ActionStep providing specific functionality exists
• Majority of "colorful" language removed from console output
  
• Bug Fixes
• Remote DB connections from SafiWorkshop don't always work
  
• completely new implementation of database connections from the SafiWorkshop.  All connections are now created from the SafiServer without requiring port redirection (which caused issues in some cases)
• RunQuery: Query parameters not always in sequence
• Web Service ActionStep not working
• fixed issue caused by missing classpath entry
  
• Getting CallInfo for outbound calls not working
  
• Known Issues
• Not all relevant logging messages getting logged to SafiWorkshop console
• Some debug messages are duplicated in SafiWorkshop console
• Server restart is not implemented.
• Changing sa password is not possible from SafiWorkshop
• First call to CallWSByWSDL takes a long time