David Sugar, maintainer of the Bayonne Project, writes . . .

Bayonne is the freely licensed multi-line voice response telephony server of the GNU project and a component of GNU Enterprise. Bayonne has traditionally provided the ability to easily create scalable telephony applications and original services that can be directly integrated with traditional scripting languages and tools commonly found on free software platforms such as GNU/Linux. Bayonne offers a wide degree of telephony hardware support and a modular architecture thru the use of plugins.

In distributing the sixth milestone release of Bayonne, we have chosen to focus on providing a free software platform for creating and deploying next generation XML integrated voice applications. Traditionally such systems have only either been available as limited proprietary software, or only provided thru external hosting services. In providing Bayonne with XML support, we intend to deliver a free software solution that not only can be used for those hosting telephony services, but which can also be integrated and deployed entirely within the enterprise if so desired.

This initial release of milestone 6 has the first functional snapshot of Bayonne XML services. This includes a plugin which introduces a special XML dialect, BayonneXML. BayonneXML is intended to become a superset of the existing CallXML dialect and will provide support for additional features and functionality specific to Bayonne. Our intent is to support a wide body of XML languages thru plugins, including those that do fully conform to existing XML language specs (CallXML, VML, VXML, XTML, etc), rather than providing a server that can only execute a single dialect. This will allow Bayonne to provide voice browsing to entirely other kinds of XML data thru the development of additional plugins.

My decision to provide XML as part of milestone 6, rather than RTP trunking, was based on the fact that the Common C++ XML parser is already very stable, while the Common C++ RTP stack has only recently reached usable functionality. Rapid progress is expected in ccRTP over the next few weeks, and that will form the core of a new, and final Bayonne Milestone, before final cleanup and release of Bayonne 1.0. In addition to ccRTP, there is certainly also need for further development of URL streaming in Common C++. While there is now a core team of committed developers in place for Bayonne, there are many additional areas of development where we do need and could use additional contributors. If you are interested in helping with Bayonne development, join the mailing list by sending an email here or send email to me directly.

— David Sugar / [email protected], Bayonne Maintainer

 
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