Sun Microsystems Inc and Lucent Technologies Inc have announced implementations of the JTAPI Java Telephony API for developing CTI computer telephony integration applications in Java. Lucent demonstrated a JTAPI application for managing conference calls on a voice network from a computer several months ago and yesterday said it would make JTAPI versions of its PassageWay telephony services development kit available next quarter with production ships due in the third. Lucent’s software allows any Java-based JTAPI applications to be supported on PassageWay programs which use the TSAPI Telephony Services API created by Novell Inc with help from Lucent and other companies. Using a PassageWay-based call center application, a ringing phone would activate caller ID which automatically searches a customer database for information on the caller which is returned to the operator’s terminal. Support for JTAPI means that Java written for retrieving and displaying customer information can be written once and run on any client, including web browsers, with a Java virtual machine. Sun, meanwhile, has integrated a JTAPI runtime environment it calls JavaTel upon the XTL extensions to its Solaris operating system which support the development of CTI applications on Sun servers. JTAPI was written by Sun, Lucent, Northern Telecom, Intel, IBM and Novell and announced last October. It’s eventually supposed to support applications written to Microsoft Corp’s TAPI Telephony API in addition to TSAPI, though no-one has yet demonstrated that kind of implementation. Sun is trying to position JTAPI as the upgrade path for XTL, TAPI (Windows) and TSAPI (Novell) developers.
