A web-based Internet Java Phone for real-time voice communication

Although a wide range of Internet telephony applications such as VocalTec's Internet Phone and Microsoft's NetMeeting has been developed to support real-time voice communication over the Internet, they are predominantly written for the Windows 95/NT platform and are not compatible with other operating systems. Moreover, most of the Internet telephony software is operated as stand-alone applications and must be downloaded and installed prior to operation. This has caused great inconvenience in using Internet telephony software. To resolve this, a web-based Internet Java Phone (or IJPhone) which can be downloaded from the Internet and run from standard Java-compliant web browser, is proposed in this paper. The IJPhone system consists of two main components: the Web-based Telephone Exchange for user connection and Internet Java Phone Applet for establishing real-time Internet voice communication. In addition, as Java applets have certain security restrictions placed on them, the paper also discusses the method proposed to overcome them.