Elsipo SIP Browser - navigate the VoIP service via SIP

Copyright 2011 - Daniel-Constantin Mierla License: GPLv2

1. About

Elsipo is a SIP (RFC3261) capable application that displays HTML content received via SIP. The initial User Interface can be loaded from a local HTML file or dowmloaded from a web server.

Being a developer of a server-side SIP application (Kamailio SIP Server - http://www.kamailio.org), I found annoyng that SIP client-side applications look the same no matter what provider you use. From here poped up the idea of having a SIP client-side application that has the user interface easy to customize and update by provider itself.

2. Description

Practically Elsipo is an HTML viewer, based on QTWebKit, capable of loading plugins. The first plugin implemented is named E_PJSIP, which add SIP communication support based on libpjsip.

E_PJSIP plugin exports to Elsipo HTML viewer a new Javascript class named 'sip' that can be used to initiate SIP events, such as voice calls or instant messages. The plugin executes also Javascript callback functions when SIP events are coming from the network.

To some extent, you can call Elsipo a SIP softphone with User Interface (UI) implemented in HTML, CSS and Javascript.

3. Status

The code published is alpha stage at this time. I had the idea long time ago, but my main open source project kept me very busy. During last days I spent some time to update the code I had to latest QT and libpjsip versions, with the goal of making it public, under open source license, in order to see the interest in this idea and get eventually new contributors.

At this time, the application is able to:

• register to a SIP server with authentication (username and password)
• receive and send instant messaging
• export to Javascript of function to initiate a call
• popup dialog (alert) when a call comes in (no audio alert)
• the core of Elsipo has support to handle the events related to voice calls,
  such as initiate call, get notified when a call comes in, answer the call,
  reject the call, terminate an active call
• addresses (to dial to or send IM to) have to be given as full SIP URI
  (e.g., sip:[email protected])
• SIP presence is offered by pjsip library, getting it to Elsipo is a matter
  of JS API wrappers

4. Installation

Code was developed on Mac OS X, but it is with portable C++ using QT framework.

Linux version was tested on Ubuntu 10.04 32b. You would need to adapt the .pro file for e_pjsip plugin to set the proper path and names for pjsip libs when you compile it for other Linux OSes.

To compile Elsipo you need pjsip library installed, see http://www.pjsip.org for more details. Also the QT development framework has to be installed.

If you have QT Creator, you can open src/elsipo-group.pro in it and build it there. Also, you can type 'make' command in a terminal when you are in 'elsipo/src/elsipo' sub-folder.

When using the 'make' command, be sure you generate the Makefiles for you platform, in folder 'elsipo/src/elsipo', run the command:

qmake -makefile -recursive elsipo-group.pro

Command 'qmake' is part of QT toolkit (on Debian packaged as qt4-qmake).

The Elsipo application will be built in 'src/elsipo/bin/' folder and you can run it from there. Until it gets to a beta state, it is recommended you run it from sources folder.

5. Configuration

Elsipo expects the configuration file in user home directory '.elsipo/elsipo.ini'. A sample content:

[Elsipo]
url=file:///home/test/.elsipo/elsipo-ui/index.html

[Plugin.Pjsip]
username=test
password=abc
domain=sipserver.com
port=5060

The 'url' parameter in [Elsipo] group is the link to User Interface, in this example pointing to a local HTML file. It can be a web link as well.

The group [Plugin.Pjsip] holds the attributes to connect to SIP server, such as SIP username and password, server's domain and port.

6. User Interface

I created a small HTML page with CSS and basic Javascript callback, mainly for demo purposes. It is located in 'etc/ui/elsipo-ui'.

Besides classic SIP registration, voice calls and instant messaging, this UI will display inside INFO box the content of MESSAGE requests coming from user 'id-i_infotext'. Actually the Javascript callback for MESSAGE requests will update the HTML element having the id the rest of the string after 'id-', at this moment the UI has a element.

7. Contributions

The project was started for this purpose. I am a server side application developer, coding mainly in C. If you like the idea and you are familiar with one of following technologies: C++, HTML, CSS, Javascript or SIP/VOIP, come on board. I defintely can help with C/C++ and SIP/VoIP parts, help to UI and Javascript is really demanded.

Think about what you could be achieved:

• when you start using the VoIP provider X, the whole interface will be pulled
  from provider, giving you the directory to access the voice mail, audio
  conference server, current rates/offers, a.s.o.
• personalized feeling of UI per provider and user
• self-done extensions to UI by just writing HTML/CSS/Javascript

Isn't it cool? Come on board and contribute.

8. Contact

Write me any opinion you have about this project, of course, also when you want to become contributor, at: <miconda [at] gmail.com> or via GITHub portal.