Martello Technologies develop fault, performance, and management solutions for Unified Communications (UC) systems, with a specialization on Mitel UC.
Martello has been working with its partner, one of the top worldwide UC vendors, to automate provisioning for VoIP devices, using the Restlet Framework, and developed with the Groovy programming language.
We interviewed Antoine Roux, lead developer at Martello Technologies, to tell us about their usage of Restlet Framework and Groovy.
In a large company with different office locations, an employee might relocate from one office to another, and her number needs to be moved over, as well as all the related information (favorite numbers, authorizations…)
Provisioning of telephony services and of Unified Communications systems in general is usually a long, tedious, and manual process, which takes lots of time for the network administrators. Automating such tasks is a big time saving exercise.
That’s where Groovy and Restlet Framework were used, to fully automate such tasks, in order to go down from half an hour of manual steps to an operation which takes place in the span of a click of a button. A web interface was developed to specify the various parameters (employee, phone number, devices, etc.), calling the Groovy and Restlet Framework backend to do the heavy-lifting of automation.
Antoine Roux explained that “Restlet Framework is very snappy and starts in mere milliseconds, allowing developers to quickly develop and test new behavior” and that “Restlet Framework offers an expressive and concise API that is easy to work with, focus on the specific concern of creating RESTful Web APIs.”
Key points
- Thanks to Restlet Framework, Martello developers were able to integrate a rich front-end application based on Angular with a back-end interacting with UC systems, in a fashion that provides near real-time feedback to users.
- Restlet Framework allowed Martello developers to quickly build and test their Web API thanks to Restlet Framework’s concise API and its super rapid startup time.
Benefits
- Before developing this solution using Restlet Framework and Groovy, operations to move the phone and related information from one location to another would take at least half an hour of an operator, for very repetitive and manual tasks.
- With the new solution in place, such operations became as simple as filling and submitting a form with the operation details to the application and API built and served with Restlet Framework.
Advantages
- The Restlet Framework engine starts up in milliseconds, making it very suitable for quick test and development cycles, compared to more heavy-weight Web frameworks that often take several seconds (up to a half minute) to be ready to serve as API.
- Restlet Framework offers an expressive and concise API that is easy to work with, focus on the specific concern of creating RESTful Web APIs.
- The Groovy Programming Language was used to develop with Restlet Framework, as it gives developers a more succinct and readable syntax to use and configure Restlet Framework.
- The Spock testing framework (a Groovy-based testing library) allowed developers of Martello Technologies to define clearer specifications of how the Restlet Framework-based Web APIs should operate under the various scenarios under test.