Open Source
The release of GAIA Reply™ as an Open Source solution
Open Source is considered a winning approach including not only technological reasons, but also economical and ethical ones. A more and more popular and effective approach to manage the development and distribution of softwares.
Reply has selected the Open Source model as the proper model to meet enterprise needs in terms of Mobile Services: the goal is the release of
GAIA Mobile Service Platform to the Open Source community.
The release of GAIA Reply™ as an Open Source solution has a variety of goals, among which one of the most important is supporting the birth and the development of a community of developers, content providers, device suppliers and system integrators that collaborate and create an
integrated ecosystem.
Since mobile devices have different capabilities and characteristics, one of the key features of GAIA Reply™ is Content Adaptation: this feature is meant to transform multimedia contents, providing an usable format to visualize them at best. GAIA Image Transcoder is one of its main components, that, inside the platform, implements and offers content adaptation functionalities.
After the release of GIT, Reply defined the GAIA Roadmap through the second half of 2007 and selected the next components to be published according to the feedbacks received. The two major developments developed in this period of time with the support of the community are of interest for all the mobile service developers.
The first step of this evolution is called GaWis (GAIA Web Information System): its goal is to simplify the interaction with WURFL, UAProf and any other device capabilities information source, exploiting the functionalities of database technology. The final version of GAIA Web Information System can be downloaded from the GaWis project site.
The second step is called Alembik and is the result of the fruitful collaboration between Reply and Kimia. Alembik is an OMA STI compliant media transcoding server based on Java (J2EE) technology. Alembik is the evolution of GAIA Image Transcoder, the component of GAIA Reply™ that implements and offers image adaptation functionalities. Alembik is integrated into GAIA Reply™ to provide transcoding services for different media types (image, audio, video, etc).
So far Alembik has already been successfully tested and deployed (including production environments) on various application servers, including Glassfish, JBoss and Tomcat. It currently offers four communication channels for scheduling transcoding jobs: EJB facade, SOAP service, JSP tag library and HTTP servlet. Since Alembik is tightly coupled with WURFL repository, it can be adjusted to particular client needs in a simple and straight-forward way. More details can be found on the Alembik project site.
