Rapid development and delivery of converged services using APIs

To what extent will the emerging set of application programming interfaces (APIs), and environments that provide these APIs, support the vision of rapid service development for converged networks. In this paper, we report on lessons learned, both through participation in standards bodies and from recent prototyping using some of these APIs. We describe four API environments: Telecommunications Service Access and Subscription (TSAS) Parlay, Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and Java{*} APIs for integrated Networks (JAIN{*}). We then discuss how these API environments address several issues key to rapid service development and deployment.