[h323plus] General WorkPlan for H323plus

[Simon Horne]

Guys

As you are aware the focus of H323plus is about the plus (new
features/services) and less about architecture redesign allowing existing
applications to be upgraded/improved without requiring wholesale code
changes yet still have access to the latest and greatest features like
H.239, H.350 etc. With the exception of the upcoming upgrade to PTLib 2.x we
hope to continue in that vain.

As most of you are aware I also have commitments to GnuGk and PacPhone so I
am spread thin at the best of times but at the moment it is quite accute. I
have 5 documents to be presented to the ITU meeting in Korea in January as
well as other work which I hope to make an announcement on in the new year.

Here are some the current work items.
Migration to ptlib 2.x  (ETA January) which has been previously discussed.

Addition of GnuGK NAT Traversal. (ETA 1 week) This will allow the H323plus
based applications to natively traverse NATs using GnuGk. The code has been
tried and tested and working with PacPhone for over a year, I have just tidy
up it and added better documentation. Note this is not the ITU standard
method which is H.460.18/19.

H.235.6. (ETA January) This is the defacto standard for H.323 Media
encryption with support with polycom PVX, Tandberg and Codian. Thanks heaps
to bian xuegong for helping sort it out. There is some new work at the ITU
upgrading the encryption from AES128 to AES256 so hopefully that will be
included.

File Transfer. (ETA January) This is really cool. This allows the transfer
of files via TFTP encaptulated in RTP frames allowing lightweight data
transfer without the need for the T.120 framework overhead. Since it uses
RTP it can use existing NAT Traversal mechanisms like GnuGk to traverse
NATs. I am putting forward a submission to the ITU on this so watch out for
that.

H.460.presence (ETA Feburary) I have a submission to the ITU for scalable
presence system I have been working on for sometime. I hope to have this
finalised and committed by Feb.

H.460.MMS (ETA ?) Multimedia Messaging. This is also up for submission to
the ITU. This is a companion and extension on H.460.tm (Text Messaging)
which is in the extensions directory of the CVS.

There is an exciting year ahead for h323plus.

Simon