NEDA's Free Software Base

To build large multi-platform, scalable and industrial strength software, a solid development foundation is required. The following large pieces of software provide the foundation (consistency, portability, managability, scalability, ease-of configuration etc.) for Neda's products and services.

Figure 2: Neda Software Architecture

Figure 2 provides a high-level overview of Neda's software components and architecture. A brief description of the key software components is provided below.

Open C Platform (OCP):

OCP is an efficient virtualization layer that provides the basic support for all of Neda's developed products. OCP presently supports 8 distinct target platforms and a large number of development environments. OCP is freely and openly available, and is very well documented in [12].

All of Neda's products use OCP and conform to its style and conventions.

To understand Neda's software development style, quality and philosophy, we recommend a review of OCP [12]. At Neda we take great pride in our work. OCP is free, open and publicly available. We invite interested readers to check it out.

ESRO Protocol Engines:

The ESRO protocol engines are highly portable and are shared across a large number of platforms.

The ESRO protocol engines are based on OCP, are fully documented, and have been very extensively tested.

For additional information about the ESRO Protocol Engines, please refer to [5], [6], [3].

EMSD Protocol Engines:

All of our EMSD products use the EMSD protocol engines. The EMSD protocol engines are highly portable and are shared across a large number of platforms.

All EMSD protocol engines are based on OCP, are fully documented, and are very extensively tested. A particular packaging of the EMSD Protocol Engines is one of our technology products.

For additional information about EMSD Protocol Engines, please refer to [4], [2], [3].

Open-Source Message Center Architecture:

Over the years we have invested a great deal of time in the use of open-source software modules. In particular, we have made significant investments in the following large pieces of software: Qmail, Sendmail, Bind, IMAP C-Client, and Hylafax.

We have also invested greatly in Neda-developed utilities and tools that bring these individual software components under a consistent umbrella for administration, management, accounting and monitoring.

Voice Response Development Environment (VoRDE):

VoRDE is the basis for all of Neda's Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems and services.

For additional information about VoRDE, please refer to [14], [13].

Our basic goal is to make the above software heavily used and widespread.

For generic platforms, we will make the software available as free software through the
http://www.MailMeAnywhere.org/ software distribution center. The challenge here is to create a large virtual community of developers who use this software and further enhance it. On the device side, device software will be made available on most generic platforms including PalmOS, EPOC, WindowsCE, Windows9X, and Windows-NT. On the Server side, software will be available on Solaris, Linux and NT.

In addition to generic platforms, we will also make the software available in various embedded environments. See [10] for a list of Neda licensees.