[vtp-dev] Evaluating VTP.

[blaise@xxxxxxxxxxx]

Hello,

I am currently evaluating VTP for a company that I am consulting for. As a
bit of background I am currently working with a team on an app designed in
Audium, that has approx 20 canvases with up to 20 elements (modules) on
each page. The application could be considered to be complex as each voice
element has a dynamic nature, playing different prompts depending on the
number of times visited, the path taken through the app to get to the
element, and the level of confidence in speech recognition. There are many
paths through the system mainly resulting from globally accessible menus.
We have additionally added elements for more complex tasks to cut down on
the number of elements in each canvas, reducing it to it's present size. I
am looking at VTP to see if we would be able to develop future application
of this nature using the eclipse VTP, and in addition how much effort/time
would be required to add to VTP to provide functionality that is on the
wish list that I'm putting together for Santa for Christmas:-). Which
brings be to my questions:

Q) Can the openVXML editor, persona editor be modified to act on callflows
in the standard web projects file structure? This would allow all app
components e.g. Callflow, VXML, grammar files, media files, JSP, and Java
to exist within the same project.

Q) Would it be possible to have multiple callflows within a project? The
reason that I ask is although callflows are powerful they don't readily
allow several developers to work on them concurrently. This would allow
the callflow to be componentized, and procedurized.

Q) Could the callflow be extended to handle returning canvas calls? It can
be done with wormholes but if you have many exits to one canvas it is hard
knowing where to return to, you tend to end up with lots of global
variables and lots of additional elements.

Q) Could modules with entry exit points for JSP pages be added? So that
the callflow could act in the role of front controller allowing JSP on
occasion to handle the more complex vxml rendering tasks, especially if
this involved generating complex javascript enabled vxml forms for the
voice browsers, to reduce the number of Browser -> Server fetches.

Q) How do you embed java behind the callflow, is this possible...

Q) Is the callflow xml object model available to be manipulated in java?
This is necessary for dynamic tasks such as substituting prompts depending
on state.

Q) What is required to adapt the xml meta model for different browsers at
runtime?

Q) For debugging purposes would it be possible to enhance the tools to be
able to trace a callflow as it was executed within the runtime environment
as it was executed, visually from within the eclipse VTP client
application.

Q) Where should I check out the VTP source from is it under the WTP cvs
tree, has the openVXML code been added into the VTP source tree yet.

Any Feedback would be much appreciated.

Blaise.