A Comparison of Three Programming Models for Telecom Service Composition

Service composition technologies are very important to telecom industry today since they allow application developers to make use of existing services as building blocks to create new services in a rapid and flexible manner in order to catch the fast changing market dynamics. The building block services are usually telecom network capabilities exposed through various protocols (e.g., SIP, Parlay) as well as IT software functions provided through certain interfaces (e.g., RPC, Web Services). Currently, most of telecom applications are created as program logic in pure programming languages (e.g., Java) or by SIP Servlet, so as to satisfy functional and non-functional requirements. Although BPEI is adopted in service composition more widely, whether it is a good solution for telecom domain is still controversial. In this paper, we experiment in three approaches - SIP Servlet, pure programming language of Java and BPEI - to build a same composite service with analysis on developer experience. Preliminary conclusions are drawn based on difference comparison of these composition models in terms of programming efforts and service runtime performance.