Probably the most important aspect of the "Application Insight" tool is the
Monitor/Debug page. By default, it shows the currently executing log and
debugging statements for the current call, if the call has been made into the
mapped phone number. Alternatively, the virtual phone provided by the tool
allows the developer to simulate a call (which uses the SIP protocol underneath)
and then the user can type in the responses for the speech recognition interface
in the "interpret" window. One remarkably different aspect of the tool is that
it doesn't matter whether you are testing the application from a real phone or
from a SIP based phone--you get the same logging & debugging interface. The tool
also provides a neat step-by-step debugging interface which allows the developer
to review the variable stack trace and review the application accordingly. To be
able to utilize the soft-phone features you definitely would need to be outside
the firewall. Even though the tool is in beta stage, I found it to be pretty
stable, however, one of the issues that Voxeo needs work on is to add context sensitive help to the application.
Voxeo Designer
Voxeo Designer is a visual application design tool which allows VoiceXML
developers to use a flowchart-based visual tool to develop VoiceXML
applications. Designer (shown below) is a "Pure Java"-based IDE, however, the current
installer is only available for Microsoft Windows. Voxeo newsgroups do include a
workaround for installing it on Unix platforms. Designer includes features such as
round-trip development (i.e. you can open an existing VoiceXML file or create a VoiceXML
file), validation and support for FTP/HTTP for reading and writing documents.
The current version (2.0 beta) supports Voxeo's CallXML Tags and has beta support
for VoiceXML 1.0. Voxeo Designer can be used for creating VoiceXML-based
mockup applications, using the generated VoiceXML code as a template for a dynamic JSP/ASP/ASP.NET/PHP/Perl etc. serverside-based application. The visual layout and flow modeling aspect and the context-sensitive VoiceXML palette were particularly useful. It
would really be helpful if the Designer could support the latest
standards; for instance VoiceXML 1.0 beta support has been there for quite some
time. Also, the tool should have "wizard-based" basic grammar development
as well. One of the other issues I had with the tool is that it seemed to
generate a couple of designer specific processing instructions directly within the
template. These processing instructions are used to store the coordinates of
the actual visual elements that are used to represent those particular elements.
This information shouldn't be stored in the VoiceXML file itself, but should rather be
stored either in a properties file or some kind of project specification
file. The ability to group a bunch of VoiceXML documents within the Designer would
also be a feature that would be useful.
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