This is a blog about Telia Operator Service Platform Opaali – specifically about its programming interface the Opaali API.
Welcome to the Opaali (API) Blog
If you have found your way here, you are probably painfully aware that you need to port your existing application, which uses Content Gateway APIs, to the new REST based Opaali API. If not, you may want to check the Opaali Portal for more information.
This blog is here to help you in using the Opaali API from your own source code – especially if you are migrating your existing application from Content Gateway. (But the information here is useful for those who are writing their first Opaali application from scratch, also).
There will be example code snippets (stored in this GitHub repository) with explanations in blog posts. There will also be a couple of full applications in source code form which you can use as almost drop-in replacements for some of the existing Content Gateway installations (but not all, unfortunately).
Who are we?
Although this blog and the accompanying source code is maintained by the Content Gateway to Opaali migration team, this is not part of the official Opaali product offering from Telia. During the migration period the migration team will update the blog and code irregularly. What happens after the migration has completed and the migration team will have disbanded - we don’t know. The content of this GitHub repository comes with no guarantee from Telia whatsoever.
Purpose of…(life?)
The main purpose of this blog and the code published here is to ease the work load of opaali-tuki@teliacompany.com and the migration team through:
- efficiently distributing information about how to use the Opaali API (instead of answering individually by email to all the same questions)
- publishing source code examples which are known to work (…at least at the time of publishing) so that you don’t all have to repeat the same mistakes
This blog and source code is published alongside their other work by the migration team working at Telia. The published code is known to work at the time it is published, and if during the migration period it stops working, we try to update it. At the time of writing this, the Opaali API is still evolving and new functionality (some of it based on feedback from you, the existing CGW users!) is being added in future releases. Sometimes this will unfortunately break existing code. Sometimes the API documentation is a bit vague in details, and the migration team tries to find the missing details by trial and error (and asking from the platform vendor’s technical support, of course). Sometimes we get it wrong, though. Whenever we notice an issue that generates lots of queries to Opaali Support mailbox, we try to find time to write and post an article about it here. Or if the Opaali API behaviour changes. Or when there is new functionality.
What you can expect to learn here
This blog concentrates on programming issues related to using the Opaali API (it should really have been called “The Opaali API Blog”).
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there will be mini programming courses on how to get started using the Opaali API, accompanied by very short code snippets (we already tried doing this on the Opaali Portal Forum, but that didn’t work too well…)
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there will be a couple of full applications targeted especially for existing CGW users. Initially the functionality will be quite minimal, but we intend to add more functionality and document some details of the code in accompanying blog posts.
There already is a shell script based implementation of the command line send application that was distributed in the CGW Provider Server installation package. It should be useful for light production use (the original CGW version of the send command was not intended for heavy use either). We have done very limited testing with it, and we know that some versions of the curl command that it uses do not work without additional flags.
We also plan to publish a simple Java based server that implements the CGW HTTP interface, but that one is not ready yet.
What you will not find out here
We cannot answer the question: “When will Content Gateway be shut down?”. We don’t know. And if we did (which we don’t!), we couldn’t tell you, because that kind of information can only be passed through the official Opaali Support at Telia.
There will not be many details about how the Opaali Portal is used, as this blog is about programming using the Opaali API. There is some good documentation on such topics in the Resources section of the Opaali Portal.
You won’t find a comment or feedback form on this blog either, at least not initially. Although I said that this blog is maintained by the migration team from Telia, the team is very small, and as the only programmer in the team it will probably be mostly just me writing here. Irregularly. When I have time. And something to write about.
However, you can reach us through the opaali-tuki@teliacompany.com mailbox, all non-trivial questions will be passed on to the migration team. The Opaali Portal Resources section contains the official documentation. The API documentation might be quite terse and sometimes hard to decipher. We will post more verbose explanations here in the blog and some of the other documentation will be published on the Opaali Portal. The Portal also contains a Forum where you could ask your questions, but it has turned out that you will get an answer much quicker by sending your question to the opaali-tuki@teliacompany.com mailbox, so I recommend doing just that.
And finally
Remember, official support is available from Telia through the Opaali Portal and opaali-tuki@teliacompany.com – all the material here on GitHub comes AS IS, with no guarantee or warranty whatsover.
JPLa is a member of the Content Gateway (CGW) to Opaali migration team, specialising in programming related issues and API usage.