Introducing Widget-based IMS Client Applications

Classic telecommunication methods and Internet services are converging. For this reason Telecommunication companies are looking for new ways to include their services in Web 2.0 applications. A strong candidate for the telecommunication infrastructure of the future is the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), an all IP telecommunication core network. In the last few years a new kind of application has increasingly gained popularity: they are known as widgets. Widgets are small but fancy applications based on Web technologies that are very easy to develop. This paper describes a new approach to combining widgets with telecommunication features, such as Voice over IP calls or messaging, using IMS. Our solution includes a new abstraction layer with interfaces for the different telecommunication capabilities. Moreover, we implemented a widget engine that makes these telecommunication interfaces available to its widgets. Our solution allows the rapid development of new IMS client applications and a short time-to-market. The combination of other Web 2.0 services with IMS features becomes an exploitable opportunity.