| [vtp-dev] Milestone planning |
I hope everyone has had a chance to take a look at the OpenMethods donation or at least look at the flash demos available on the VTP web site. We're in the enviable position of having a mature commercial product donation and that presents interesting concerns in terms of scheduling a milestone plan for open source releases. I had previously communicated on the list and in the 1.0 release review an intent of moving currency to WTP 1.5; bringing the VTP up to currency with the donation fully integrated would make a great release.
Here are my high level thoughts on what the release timeframe could look like which I'd like to invite comments on. I think that community feedback at this stage is crucial and so I'd definitely like to hear more from everyone on the list about what they are liking and not liking about the OpenMethods donation and how they would like to see its integration move forward in the VTP.
As requested on the list, I believe we should have a simple milestone soon (August 25) to integrate the contribution and the existing source into a common build structure, including any automated unit testing that may be available. This would also be a good time to go ahead and mark most packages internal as only a small portion of the donation will end up being API.
For a next milestone six weeks after that (October 6) I believe the focus could be making sure the donation is compatible with the Tellme Studio platform so that our existing browser work is utilized. The API definitions for creating custom modules in the graphical designer could also be put out in draft form at this point with documentation. In general, I hope that as soon as possible we are able to get API and file format draft documentation to the vtp-dev list and also on the web site for people to look at so that when we get to this point we'll be already guiding towards what the community wants.
For a later milestone (November 17), community feedback on the API could be finalized and any look and feel work collaborated on by the community could be wrapped up. I'd also like to see the JVoiceXML browser linkages integrated. At this point the graphical donation would be a tightly coupled part of the voice tools project functionality and API and would have responded to community feedback. From here, we would be in a good position to release a new VTP version.
Thoughts?
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Brent D. Metz
Enterprise Voice Tools
bdmetz@xxxxxxxxxx
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay