Umbra designer: Graphical modelling for telephony services

Abstract

Almira Labs is a software company that develops value-added services for the telecommunications industry. It is focused on innovative technologies that enable enterprise business and mobile and landline operators to offer next-generation voice-driven applications for all types of phones. Telephony services are built atop the proprietary Umbra framework, which is a Java API relying on the JAIN SLEE standard for event-based communication applications. This paper describes Umbra Designer, a novel graphical modelling tool for the visual development of telephony services, from which Java code for the Umbra framework is synthesized. In this way, it is easy to develop ready-to-use services, even by users not familiar with the Java API or the JAIN SLEE standard. We also report on some experiments aimed at measuring the efficiency gain derived from using the graphical tool, compared with coding directly using the Java API. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.