MESSAGE
| DATE | 2008-01-13 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] BAYONNE SQLEDGER
|
Dave
There is a fork of SQLLedger worth looking into for a variety of
reasons.
Ruben
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Integrated telephony and the roadmap to Bayonne 3.0
By David Sugar
Online on: 2007-01-10
I have noticed many of our sister free software projects have recently
incorporated features commonly associated with Bayonne. Asterisk 1.4,
for example, introduces a native scripting language. The excellent
community fork of Asterisk, OpenPBX, had planned to use embedded io for
this purpose. FreeSwitch, another very interesting project, is looking
at adding something like an external execute facility something like
Bayonne’s original tgi or Asterisk’s later agi. While we have had
neither time, facilities, nor resources available to focus on fancy new
drivers or protocols for recent Bayonne releases, we have focused in
one area which I believe is about the future, integrated telephony.
Integrated Telephony is about making telephony services seamlessly
available both to users and other applications. There have been other
efforts to introduce generic and open standards based computer telephony
integration before. One such effort was NextPath’s SCTP (Simple Computer
Telephony Protocol), and some ideas found in it still exist, as part
of SIP. Another effort was TOSI which we were looking to use originally
in Bayonne. What these and other similar efforts had in common is that
they focused on introducing entirely new protocols (most often over TCP)
for telephony integration rather than making use of existing services.
In the proprietary software world, there are integration protocols such as
CSTA. These were based on the idea of exposing eventing and call states
in a common way. Unfortunately no vendor actually introduced these ideas
in said common way, and the actual standards document to describe it
are neither free, nor even comprehensible, given the vast size of that
spec. Other solutions, such as Microsoft’s TAPI and Novell’s TSAPI,
have focused on providing a documented public application interface
to hide proprietary and undisclosed backend implementations. The same
approach is used in JTAPI.
Given that we are talking about integrated telephony for free software,
we do not have reasons for nor desire to introduce or support undocumented
or source secret back-end protocols. Nor do I think we should introduce
new protocols where existing and well understood protocols and services
may already exist. Our approach to achieving integrated telephony is
founded upon three simple ideas: the use of fully standard xmlrpc as a
foundation for exposing telephony services and functionality; the use of
XML network eventing; and, the application of basic http to transport
bulk a/v data between applications and the telephony server. Together
these allow one to create new kinds of telephony integrated applications,
whether programming applets for the desktop that show incoming callers
or web services and hosted applications which make use of telephony in
complex and interesting ways.
An example of web hosted integrated telephony could be to introduce
telephony services to SQL Ledger. While it may be nice to add the basic
ability to click on telephone numbers and have your customers dialed,
I think it would also be interesting and useful to have a contacts
icon next to the number which can launch a java applet to record the
customer’s name and post it back into the telephony server, so that
one can use it for example in splash calling announcements at pickup or
for customer service agents who might be on headsets, or use a frame
and some javascript to provide event notification of new callers that
include SQL-Ledger’s existing customer meta-data. It is in these kinds
of seamless ways that I believe we can finally move from classical ideas
like click-to-dial services, and from proprietary back-end protocols
used by things like Mircosoft Windows TAPI, to common and open standards
which can support integrated telephony for both desktop clients and web
hosted applications.
A side benefit is of course being able to use these same methods for
telephony management and control applications. With the recent freeing
of Java, I am in particular interested in developing a Java version of
our original Bayonne1 network operations center monitor, sitemon. We
may look at doing some fun and useful things, like introducing a gnome
applet to alert you about incoming calls and voice mail. Integrated
telephony using open standards and protocols is just one of several
things planned for the 3.0 release of GNU Bayonne, and in fact is already
initially available in the current 2.3 release series. However, I think
it is our most important and represents one of the reasons why I think
working in the free world is often so much better than working in the
proprietary one. Tags: bayonne, telephony, voip, webservice
--
http://www.mrbrklyn.com - Interesting Stuff
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://fairuse.nylxs.com DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
"Yeah - I write Free Software...so SUE ME"
"The tremendous problem we face is that we are becoming sharecroppers to our own cultural heritage -- we need the ability to participate in our own society."
"> I'm an engineer. I choose the best tool for the job, politics be damned.<
You must be a stupid engineer then, because politcs and technology have been attached at the hip since the 1st dynasty in Ancient Egypt. I guess you missed that one."
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