Abstract

This thesis proposes a novel Web service based API for presence based application development that is protocol, network, language, platform and architecture independent. The proposed API is highly abstracted with the intention that even non-telephony experts like IT developers should be able to incorporate the presence functionalities for creating services. Two case studies are also provided to show the usefulness, completeness and flexibility of the proposed API. A subset of the API is implemented as a Web service gateway and mapped to a SIMPLE based presence server besides that Web service based clients are also prototyped. One of the main aims of this research work is to see the feasibility of using the Web services middleware for telecommunication application development; therefore performance measurements are also done. The analysis of the results show that although Web services introduces additional overhead because of XML based SOAP messages it is insignificant compared to the interoperability and easier application development features offered by this middleware. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)