JBilling 2 has been released

The milestone release of jBilling 2 is now available for download. It includes hundreds of changes, most of them are minor enhancements and bug fixes, but there are major improvements as well:

• Application server independent: The default download comes with Tomcat, but deploying on other application servers will be easy. The application is bundled as a single war file.
• MQ independent: The default here is ActiveMQ, but again, you can configure jBilling to run on your favorite MQ implementation.
• API improvements: several new methods, including an instant payment processing with automatic linking to outstanding invoices and the ability to run the billing process for a single user on-demand.
• New telco invoice design which includes the events as an invoice appendix. This what shows every call detail (or the details of other events, if they are not phone calls).
• Pre-paid balance management. In this case, the customer increases her balance by submitting a payment, and the balance decreases with every purchase (usage). You can make an API call to validate if a customer can make a purchase. The validation is against the price of the intended purchase against the current balance.
• Credit limit. For a customer with a credit limit, every purchase increases the balance which should not exceed the preset credit limit. Again, an API method can be called to validate purchases against the credit balance before they happen.
• Account hierarchies of any depth. There used to be a limit of two levels: parent and child. No more, you can now build hierarchical structures of any depth, and mark any user as the one receiving an invoice.
• Events-to-rules plug-in. There is a new plug-in that allows you to run rules when any internal event in jBilling happens. This takes the extensibility of jBilling to a new level, it combines the plug-in architecture and the internal events design with the business rules management system.

For a complete list of changes, take a look to the release notes.

Provisioning module now documented in the Telecom Guide

We have added a chapter to the telecom guide with the details of how to configure and extend this new module. The provisioning module was introduced in the 1.1.3 release, about two months ago. It is a complex module that can help greatly with the painful integration needed between the billing system and those systems responsible for serving your services to the end customers.

This module has been designed for flexibility. So much so, that you can use it outside jBilling. You can deploy the provisioning module and use it to simplify the interaction between any system and your services. We use message queues (through JMS) to achieve that level of modularity. In fact, jBilling core acts just like another client when sending and receiving commands to the provisioning module.

jBilling 1.1.3 has been released

Hello,

I am happy to announce that jBilling 1.1.3 is available for public download. This has been the most ambitious release we have done, and the one that took the longest. Don't let the number deceive you, 1.1.3 has a lot of improvements from the 1.1.2 release. These are some highlights:

- New provisioning module: A really flexible module to ease the integration with external provisioning systems (like a telephony network). You can even use it stand alone, without the rest of jBilling.
- Add bar codes to paper invoices.
- Highly improved notifications template engine: We are using velocity to render the templates, and added support for HTML emails. You can do very fancy notifications by emails now.
- More internal events: The internal event plug-ins are very popular indeed. I see companies using this extension technique a lot (and I use it a lot myself). We are adding more internal events in the core so you can hook your own plug-ins more easily.
- CDR detail storage: The mediation process stores a detail account of every event that affected the customer's orders. Now you can send an invoice with all the call detail records.
- New database mediation readers: A new JDBC plug-in that let's you do your mediation from CDRs stored in a database.
- Migration from Entity beans to Hibernate completed. Entity beans were a major obstacle to scalability and they are now gone. And even more, we added flexible configuration to choose from local transactions (excluding the application server from any interaction with the database) and JTA transactions.

As usual, the release comes before the documentation is ready. Please be patient, there is a lot to write.

--
Emiliano Conde
Lead Developer
jBilling.com

Tell us about you, and win an iPod

Let us start by thanking you for your interest in jBilling and for helping us make it a better product, if anything, simply by sending us your comments or sharing your experience on our forums.

jBilling is downloaded thousands of times per month and we want to start reading about some of those downloads.

Tell us about how your company is using jBilling. We only need one paragraph that summarizes your story.

To be valid, your testimonial must include:
- Your full name
- Your title
- Your company name
- Your website address
- Your city and country

Send us your story (no matter how short) and run a chance of winning a free iPod. (your choice of an iPod touch 8G or an iPod classic 120GB). The draw will take place on June 1st at noon PST.

Submit your story now at admin@jbilling.com !