oFono.org is a place to bring developers together around designing an infrastructure for building mobile telephony (GSM/UMTS) applications. oFono.org is licensed under GPLv2, and it includes a high-level D-Bus API for use by telephony applications of any license. oFono.org also includes a low-level plug-in API for integrating with open source as well as third party telephony stacks, cellular modems and storage back-ends. The plug-in API functionality is modeled on public standards, in particular 3GPP TS 27.007 “AT command set for User Equipment (UE).”
What makes oFono different?
oFono aims to provide an easy to use interface that can be used to create rich telephony applications without requiring one to have a deep understanding of the underlying technology and its limitations. To accomplish this, oFono provides language-independent D-Bus API that is extremely easy to use without generated bindings or other ‘messy’ steps typically required to use an IPC based API.
The API follows the following four basic principles:
- Consistent
- Minimal
- Easy to use
- Complete
Consistent
The API should be consistent. Functionality in oFono is broken up into Interfaces, each with well-defined set of Properties. Each interface has a GetProperties() and a SetProperty() method which is used to accomplish majority of the tasks. Naming conventions are also strictly enforced. This means that once you’re comfortable using one Interface, you should be able to easily orient yourself to use others.
Minimal
The API should be minimal; there shouldn’t be more than one way of accomplishing a task as this leads to confusion and API bloat. We also aim to maintain API compatibility whenever possible, from the very beginning. This means that oFono APIs wil generally focus on the most important use-cases. Other features will be carefully considered before being included in the APIs.
Complete
At the same time, the APIs must be rich and complete enough to enable the creation of feature complete mobile phones. Thus, APIs for all aspects of telephony are planned, incudling but not limited to Voice calls, SMS, Cell Broadcast, Supplementary Services and SIM Phonebooks.
Easy to use
oFono aims to make writing telephony applications as easy as possible. Thus oFono will take care of the core logic, including things necessary for standards compliance. This will allow application writers to focus on what they should be doing: presentation aspects and funky animated UIs.
