Introduction

The Parlay APIs are designed to enable creation of telephony applications as well as to "telecom-enable" IT applications.  IT developers, who develop and deploy applications outside the traditional telecommunications network space and business model, are viewed as crucial for creating a dramatic market growth in next generation applications, services and networks.  The Parlay X Web Services are intended to stimulate the development of next generation network applications by IT developers who are not necessarily experts in telephony or telecommunications.

Parlay X Web Services are powerful yet simple, highly abstracted, imaginative, building blocks of telecommunications capabilities that developers and the IT community can both quickly comprehend and use to generate new, innovative applications.  In particular,  

	Each is abstracted from the set of telecommunications capabilities, focusing on simplicity over functionality.
	The interaction between an application incorporating a Parlay X Web Service and the server implementing the Parlay X Web Service will be done with an XML- based message exchange.
	Parlay X Web Services follow simple application semantics, allowing the developer to focus on access to the telecom capability using common Web Services programming techniques.
	Parlay X Web Services are not network equipment specific, and not network specific where a capability is relevant to more than one type of network.
	Parlay X Web Services are application interfaces and do not provide an implementation of AAA (Authorization, Authentication, and Accounting), service level agreements or other environment specific capabilities. Rather, they shall rely on proven and reliable solutions provided by the Web Services infrastructure.

Terminology. Unless otherwise specified, the document will be using the term "application" to refer to software that invokes a Parlay X Web Service. The term Parlay X Gateway is used to describe a server that implements one or more Parlay X Web Services. In telecommunications parlance an implementation of a Parlay X Web Service on a Parlay X Gateway would also be referred to as a "service".

Parlay X Web Services White Paper, Version 1.0