[SR-Users] an idea - the SIP browser - elsipo

[Daniel-Constantin Mierla]

Hello,

I want to present an idea and see if it is something people find 
benefits with such approach.

Some time ago, due to existence of only SIP client applications (aka 
softphones) that have static GUI, which were designed for generic 
purposes, do not present what servces the currently used provider offers 
nor are easy to customize, I played with the idea of a SIP application 
with the GUI in HTML/CSS/Javascript.

Being busy with Kamailio, the whole thing was postponed, but during last 
days I took the time and updated the code to latest developing tools 
(QT/Webkit and pjsip) and made it public on github, see:
   * http://asipto.com/u/3c

A screenshot and some details in the wiki at:
   * http://asipto.com/u/3b

The UI can be pulled from a remote site via http/https for example. The 
approach was to have a framework to render the UI, used QT/Webkit for 
that (cross platform, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows) and exported SIP API to 
Javascript. I worked with pjsip, but the system is plugin based, so 
pjsip plugin can be replaced, plugins for other things (not only 
sip/voip) can be written easily.

The code is just for demo/prototyping, with the goal of showing 
feasibility. At this moment can be used to make/receive calls and 
send/receive instant messaging. In addition, content of UI can be 
carried by SIP messages - the examples added so far is to request some 
server statistics when clicking on a link of UI and the SIP server 
pushing periodically some info to a section of UI.

Personally I don't have any plan to go into client side development, 
still the idea was too appealing to try and I thought would give lot of 
value and enable new features on SIP services to make user experience 
more pleasant.

Therefore the target is to see if any of you think is something that 
worth pursuing and if yes, get people on board to develop it further 
from prototype phase.

In the wiki I listed a part of my wish list with current VoIP/SIP 
services that would be trivial to implement with this approach. The 
naming as SIP browser instead of softphone hopefully suggest also the 
purpose of the application - to be able to browse the services offered 
by provider at that time and the provider to be able to push content 
back to application (on demand or periodically). Development was done on 
Mac OS X, a tarball with binaries for this OS is available for download 
on github - compiling for other OSes should go pretty straightforward.

At the moment the idea poped up there was no such approach that I could 
find (at least not in open source space), did I miss something, are you 
aware of any similar approach? What is your opinion overall?

Thanks,
Daniel

-- 
Daniel-Constantin Mierla -- http://www.asipto.com
http://linkedin.com/in/miconda -- http://twitter.com/miconda