[vtp-dev] Voice Tools Project Development Call Minutes: August 11, 2005

[Brent D Metz <bdmetz@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Eclipse Voice Tools Development Call
Minutes

August 11, 2005, 11am EST

Attendees:

Joe Oh, Audium
Frederic Gloppe, HP
Brent D. Metz, IBM
Lenora Wright, IBM
John Buttitto, SandCherry
Jeff Pedigo, SandCherry
Michael Greenawalt, TellMe


The call began with a recap of the conversations
Brent had begun with the Eclipse Foundation regarding
the steps necessary to promote the project
to the Implementation phase. The current impediment appeared to
be multiple organizations basing product
deliverables off to the VTP at the time of the review. It was
stated that this may cause schedules
to change to allow for increased maturation of the VTP in the
validation phase versus in the implementation
phase.

A summary of the SpeechTEK marketing
initiatives for the project was presented by Brent and Frederic. The
vendors at the were was stated to have
a heavy usage of eclipse, both publicly and internally and sentiment
for the VTP was said to be overwhelmingly
positive among these vendors.

A discussion of execution APIs followed,
starting with a high level overview of what features a execution API
would provide as standard cross-browser
function. The topic of how structured to make eventing back from the
browser was discussed at length and
many alternatives were proposed, from new events extending the existing
debug framework to unstructured eventing
to simply pass messages back and forth to the UI. The functionality of
each vendor's current browser implementation
was discussed from the perspective of what could be provided in an
API. It was proposed that we simply
allow browsers to return unstructured markup back to the UI along with
a
processing layer to extract meaning
for each browser. Along this line of discussion integration with a VoiceXML
Forum Data logging format was proposed.

The question of whether or not the WTP
had any web-oriented debug architecture in place was raised.
No one on the call could answer authoritatively.
It was suggested that VoiceXML is a uniqely client-oriented
programming language that demands dynamic
content debugging support in a higher priority fashion than other
client scripting languages such as _javascript_
in a web browser, and therefore is likely to be the first
implementor of such a layer of functionality.

The question of whether or not to include
Debugging API support in the initial release of an execution API was
raised. While the callers expressed
interest in starting with simply handling execution, it was also the consensus
on the call that production of a Debug
API would encourage vendors to add debugging support to their browser
implementations. It was tenatively agreed
that focusing on just the execution API portion while being cognizant of
the need to extend the API into debugging
relatively soon would be the correct approach.

Perspectives on usage of the API were
solicited from the partipants of the call, with several scenarios of usage
proposed. It was commented that all
executions of a VoiceXML browser generally have some grounding in debugging
since they are taking place in a development
environment. The lack of debug support initially was agreed to be
more about practicality in adoption
and development than in any user scenarios. Scenarios such as correleating
an executing browser with a visual tool
or performing automated test by automatically driving browser input and
parsing browser output were discussed.
Additionally, the topic of attaching to a running VoiceXML instance was
brought up along with subsequent security
issues. It was stated that by leaving the specifics of how a browser
would be attached to or launched to
the browser implementor that security and privacy issues could be avoided
in the VTP.

As the discussion began to become more
technical, it was asked if the development list should be used. It was
agreed that further discussions on the
nature of the execution API should be taken to the list where more
concrete examples can also be proposed.

An update on the state of the builds
was given. It was stated that due to the WTP build process changing there
was
an effort underway to re-engineer the
VTP builds to match the new WTP build ongoing this week. A new build to
work on top of WTP 0.7 and daily builds
were said to be in the works.

--
Brent D. Metz
Enterprise Voice Tools
bdmetz@xxxxxxxxxx
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible."
- Alan Kay