Release Notes

WebLogic SIP Server 2.1 Features and Changes

Welcome to BEA WebLogic SIP Server 2.1! WebLogic SIP Server^TM integrates SIP Servlet technologies with J2EE 1.3 and other leading Internet standards to provide a reliable framework for developing highly available, scalable, and secure telecommunications applications. WebLogic SIP Server's seamless integration of disparate, heterogeneous platforms and applications enables your network to leverage existing software investments and share the enterprise-class services and data that are crucial to building next-generation telephony applications.

The following sections describe the new features and changes made in the WebLogic Server 2.1 general release and in intermediate releases:

What's New in WebLogic SIP Server 2.1

This section details major differences between WebLogic SIP Server 2.1 and earlier versions. This section includes information about the following:

Architectural Changes

The architecture of WebLogic SIP Server 2.1 has been dramatically improved to provide increased performance, higher availability, and flexibility in configuring available resources. The most visible change in architecture is in WebLogic SIP Server's use of two separate clusters, referred to as the engine tier and data tier, that can be sized independently of one another to increase the call throughput or availability of an installation. (Development installations and small production installations can also use a single server instance as needed.) See Overview of the WebLogic SIP Server Architecture for more information about these changes. See also Capacity Planning for WebLogic SIP Server Deployments for information about sizing each cluster to match the performance and reliability goals of your applications.

Warning: When you configure a domain with multiple engine and data tier servers, you must accurately synchronize all server system clocks to a common time source (to within one or two milliseconds) in order for the SIP protocol stack to function properly. See Configuring NTP for Accurate SIP Timers for more information.

Application Porting Guidelines

SIP Servlets developed for previous versions of WebLogic SIP Server must observe new coding practices and requirements in order to operate in the version 2.1 distributed environment:

Applications should not create threads.
All Servlets should be non-blocking.
All Session data must be serializable.
Servlets must use the distributable tag, in order to deploy them to a cluster of engine tier WebLogic SIP Server instances. The distributable tag is not required and is ignored if you deploy to a single combined-tier (non-replicated) WebLogic SIP Server instance.

These and other porting requirements are described in Requirements and Best Practices for WebLogic SIP Server Applications in Developing SIP Servlets with WebLogic SIP Server.

New Security Features

WebLogic SIP Server now supports the P-Asserted-Identity SIP header as described in RFC3325. See Trusted Host Forwarding with P-Asserted-Identity in Configuring and Managing WebLogic SIP Server.

WebLogic SIP Server now supports Client-Cert authentication as well as BASIC and Digest authentication. See Configuring Client-Cert-Based Authentication for SIP Applications in Configuring and Managing WebLogic SIP Server. Client-Cert authentication is disabled by default; the switch to enable is defined in ClusterMBean and ServerMBean.

WebLogic SIP Server 2.1 now includes an RDBMS (JDBC) Digest Identity Assertion provider as well as the LDAP provider included in previous versions. In addition, both the RDBMS and LDAP providers support reverse-encrypted passwords as well as clear-text and hashed password values. See Configuring Digest Authentication for more information.

Configuration Changes

The following sections describe changes in the way you configure and manage WebLogic SIP Server 2.1.

datatier.xml Changes (Formerly statetier.xml)

The configuration file used to define partitions and replicas in the data tier is now named datatier.xml. In addition, the main XML element defined in the file has changed to data-tier (formerly state-tier). The location of the data tier configuration file has also changed; both datatier.xml and statetier.xml are located in the DOMAIN_DIR/sipserver/config subdirectory, where DOMAIN_DIR is the root directory of the WebLogic SIP Server domain.

Load Balancer Configuration Changes

Load balancer addresses are no longer defined in the sipserver.xml configuration file. Instead, the load balancer address and port number must be defined in the External Listen Address and External Listen Port fields of a SIP channel on each engine tier server. See Configuring Load Balancer Addresses in Configuring and Managing WebLogic SIP Server.

Changes in Queue Length-Based Overload Protection

When using queue- length-based overload protection controls, WebLogic SIP Server now monitors the sum of the lengths of the sip.transport.Default and sip.timer.Default execute queues, rather than only the length of sip.transport.Default. Also, the default overload configuration initiates overload protection when the combined queue size reaches 200 simultaneous requests, and releases overload control when the combined size falls to 150 simultaneous requests. See overload in Configuring and Managing WebLogic SIP Server.

sipserver.xml Changes

The schema for sipserver.xml has changed in WebLogic SIP Server. See the Engine Tier Configuration Reference (sipserver.xml) in Configuring and Managing WebLogic SIP Server. Notable changes include:

Proxy entries now use single-elements that include a full URI (rather than multiple elements for each portion of a URI).
The terminology and XML elements for regulating incoming SIP calls has changed. See overload.

In addition to schema changes, the location of sipserver.xml has changed in this release. The sipserver.xml is included as part of the sipserver enterprise application that implements the SIP container features of WebLogic SIP Server. See Overview of WebLogic SIP Server Configuration and Management.

Network Configuration Using Channels

WebLogic SIP Server 2.1 no longer uses the (previously-deprecated) connector element in sipserver.xml for configuring network connections. Instead, all connections are defined using:

The listen address and listen port for the WebLogic SIP Server instance, and
All network channel resources configured for the WebLogic SIP Server instance.

Multiple network channels can be defined to support multiple transport protocols or to configure multiple network interfaces on multi-homed server hardware. See the Managing WebLogic SIP Server Network Resources in Configuring and Managing WebLogic SIP Server.

Access Logging Configuration Changes

Access logging is no longer configured by defining a filter in the sipserver.xml configuration file. See Enabling Access Logging in Developing SIP Servlets with WebLogic SIP Server for information about the new XML configuration elements.

Container Changes for send() Calls

In previous WebLogic SIP Server releases, if an application called the send() method within a SIP request method such as doInvite(), doAck(), doNotify(), and so forth, the SIP Servlet container immediately transmitted the send() call to the network. In WebLogic SIP Server 2.1, send() calls are instead buffered in the order in which they are called, and transmitted in order only after the control has returned to the SIP Servlet container.

Warning: Applications must not wait or sleep after a call to send(), because the request or response is not transmitted until control returns to the SIP Servlet container.

What's New in WebLogic SIP Server 2.0 SP2

WebLogic SIP Server 2.0.2 introduces the following features:

Digest Authentication is now supported using a new LDAP Digest Authentication Identity Asserter and a separate authorization provider. See Configuring Digest Authentication for WebLogic SIP Server.
Deployment Descriptors in weblogic.xml now support mapping principal and role names to roles defined in sip.xml. See Securing SIP Servlet Resources.
SNMP support is now enabled by default; no patch is necessary.
Operator documentation for WebLogic SIP Server SNMP Traps is now available. See Understanding and Responding to SNMP Traps.
Administrator documentation is available for help in configuring Administration Servers in a WebLogic SIP Server domain. See Administration Server Best Practices in Managing and Monitoring WebLogic SIP Server.
Developer documentation is available for using the Eclipse IDE to develop SIP Servlets with WebLogic SIP Server. See Developing SIP Servlets Using Eclipse.

Deprecated Features in WebLogic SIP Server 2.0 SP1

WebLogic SIP Server 2.0.1 is a restricted release of a BEA product and is subject to change in future releases. The following features are specifically called out as being deprecated in WebLogic SIP Server 2.0.1:

Load balancer URIs will be obtained from Network Channel attributes, instead of sipserver.xml, in a future release of WebLogic SIP Server.
Future releases of WebLogic SIP Server may not use the built-in WLSSecurityManagerFilter and custom security manager to implement digest authentication.
sipserver.xml may not be used to configure SIP Servlet container features in future releases.
The session backup implementation is deprecated and subject to change in future releases.
Creating general-purpose SIP filters by extending a base filter class is deprecated in this release.