What is a good SIP soft phone?

[DaiShan]

Hey guys, my company has been working to deploy an Asterisk server to replace our ancient PBX. Our initial time frame for this project was to complete in the next 6 months, however recent hardware failures with our current PBX have shotgunned this project to top priority.

We've got the server end pretty much configured, and we've chosen hard phones for those that will be using them, but for IT we need to find a programmable soft phone, preferably written in Java that we can use to tie in with our customer database. Do you guys have any suggestions?

Our company is a big proponent of Open Source, so anything along those lines would be best.

 

[Templeton]

If you're willing to pay, look into the eyebeam sdk from xten, it pretty much supports everything you would ever want to do, not java though.

For open source, have a look at sipXphone, it's part of the sipX project that was open sourced by pingtel (lgpl). All of the low level libraries are implemented in c++ (sip stack, rtp, codecs, etc..), the gui is in java and interops using jni. The biggest problem I have with it is the incredibly ugly gui. I don't know how far you plan to go on integrating with your existing systems though, so this might not be an issue.

 

[DaiShan]

hey thanks a lot for the links. We've tried out x-lite (free version of xten) and thus far we like what we see, it may be worth it to invest in the SDK if we can't find an open source option.

 

[GeekDrew]

Have you subscribed to the asterisk-users and asterisk-biz mailing lists maintained by Digium? You can find a wealth of information on them.

From what I've heard, most "experts" generally discourage the use of softphones, as of right now, as they do not believe that they were up to the quality that hard phones are... and since you can integrate the current connection of a hard phone into an application (or so I'm told), the need for a soft phone diminishes greatly for many organizations.

That said, I'm not an expert, that's just what I've heard from *many* people, and it does make sense to me.