[Serdev] A suggestion for how SER should focus - was: So who/what is SER for, anyway?

[Greger V. Teigre]

Greger's comment: And finally, I interpret the last part of Dragos' post 
as a suggestion for how SER should focus and thus for whom SER should be 
for. Thus, I chose the thread name: A suggestion for how SER should focus.
-------------------------------------

In the end, one of my conclusions would be that SER is too low level to
be reliably usable in even mildly complicated scenarios by current
standards. Would be great, I think, if one of the core developers would
step-up and take a leadership role:
    - gather features for the new SER
    - design an improved architecture that takes into account the
changes in the last years in the usage patterns
    - eliminate SER's arrogance towards inexperienced users. Come on
guys, SIP becomes more and more a commodity these days than a
specialist's tool
    - consider that SER might be used as a platform for other projects
and as such nicely interface with upper layer applications
    - enforce that design by refusing compromises and hacks that do not
improve the initial design
   
When OpenSER was forked, I hoped that they will have the power to do
that, but this did not really happen there either (let's not flame about
SER/OpenSER now). What would it take for this to happen? Because in the
current state SER's "flexibility" is killing SER itself by making it too
hard to do high-level scenarios. Beginners use asterisk and experts just
start from scratch with a simple SIP stack. For example, every time that
I have to add a new feature in the Open IMS Core, dealing with simple
things is so complicated that I constantly consider dropping SER as a
base for my project and just use a normal SIP stack (like pjsip for
example).

Here is another question to Greger's blog about SER positioning - which
users is SER targeted towards? Is it just for intermediates? The ones
that grasped enough of SIP to handle it but are not yet so advanced to
write their entire proxy from scratch?

Is there a future in this sense of broadening its applicability and
could SER 2.0 be more than just marketing? Or SER is just for handling
VoIP? Because in my opinion, through the adoption of SIP as a next-gen
signaling protocol, new opportunities open up for SER. Yet there is no
clear signal that SER will continue to play this big role in NGNs as it
does now with VoIP...


Regards,
Dragos Vingarzan


FOKUS/NGNI
Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 31
10589 Berlin,Germany
Phone +49 (0)30 - 3463 - 7385
eMail vingarzan at fokus.fraunhofer.de
Web www.fokus.fraunhofer.de
We could change the world if God would give us the source code...
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