[vtp-dev] Active Projects - June 2008

[Trip Gilman <trip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: Active Projects - June 2008

June is here, and with it an update to our projects list.

Long Running Efforts
I don’t really have any changes to the list of long running efforts.  We made some decent progress last month
towards documentation and usability.  I am almost finished with the rough draft of the Language Pack tutorial.
It’s taken longer than I expected write so we didn’t see much progress towards language pack implementation.


Inactive Projects

Extended Error Path Support – On Hold – Provide the ability for the application developer to catch non-typical VXML
events that might occur during the execution of an element.  This project is indefinitely on hold until
either the compatibility issue is worked around or will wait for the next major release.


Completed Projects

Complete Initial Theme Support – Finished – Expose the selection of theme in the project/workspace preferences and
the creation of a second theme.  The new theme is out there in all it’s green goodness.  The preferences
panels could use some serious enhancing but are serviceable for now.  I think additional theme work should
Probably be packaged into a new project.

Initial Printing Support – Finished – Although this wasn’t technically on the chopping block, it got done just the
same.  This still needs tested, but seems to be working well now.


Current Projects
Unlike the efforts list, the projects list has seen some larger changes.

JVoiceXML Launcher – Extend the debug and simulation capabilities of the VTP to include using JVoiceXML
as the VXML interpreter.  This project is moving forward.  Mike has joined the mini-project team to assist
and Dirk should be joining us as a committer.  This has the added benefit of moving the development effort
into the eclipse project infrastructure as well.

Website Overhaul – It has been brought to my attention that our project site is woefully out-of-date in some
areas and lacks some of the required ties into the foundation infrastructure.  The key objectives of this
project are:

• Bring our navigation bar into line with required items and sections.
• Transition the majority of our content pages to the wiki to reduce the effort of updating in the future.
• Integration to the eclipse build infrastructure.
• Update of our downloads page to give access to automated builds.
• Update all screen-shots to reflect the current UI.
  

Proposed Projects
With some of our active projects coming to a close, there is room to start on something new.  I’d like to
ask for your input into how we proceed as a project.  We can either throw another log on the fire, or
push to polish what we have and finish the items in progress and execute a project release.  Although I
am anxious to get some of the things listed below into the project, I also know that we are at a great
position with the codebase to release.  Thoughts?  Comments?

Interface internationalization – Making the development environment interface fully i18n ready.  This is a
massive undertaking

Cut, Copy & Paste – Implement the common editing functions.  This is part of a larger discussion of editor
architecture and document model that will get going once we activate this project.

Inspector API – Add the ability to view details about an element and its configuration as part of the element
display on the canvas.  This would be a framework to allow the inclusion of inspectors by third-parties.  Also,
this will require additional features added to the theme framework to identify available inspectors and provide
screen real estate to them.

Additional Scripting Language Support – Adding support for scripting languages other than _javascript_ in
the script block and other locations scripting is used.


Regards,
Trip Gilman
Voice Tools Project Lead