Bayonne, NJ — (press release excerpt) — The latest development version of GNU Bayonne (1.1.3), released today, now offers direct and easy to use support for SQL driven database connectivity in telephony voice response applications.

GNU Bayonne has always offered database connectivity for developing telephony applications using free software. However, in the past, this required the use of TGI (Telephony Gateway Interface) support and externally written database access scripts, or by creating a custom database driver under the Infotel RPC protocol. With TGI, database access scripts were often created in perl or python.

With this new development release, it is now possible to directly embed sql statements as part of GNU Bayonne's native scripting engine, GNU ccScript. For the first time, both single and multi-row queries results can be easily processed within GNU Bayonne's server scripting language directly. Along with sql embedding comes management of persistent database connections for optimized query performance. As time allows, we will also add parellel query and connection pooling support.

TGI was initially created to support database connectivity. While it has many other uses, very often it's use had been required in the past to create GNU Bayonne telephony applications which interacted with databases. In fact, database access is often the only use made of TGI services in many existing GNU Bayonne applications. Since TGI and similar mechanisms often introduce additional system loading and potential performance penalties, using TGI is always a performance trade-off.

With direct database connectivity, and other recent advances in GNU Bayonne server scripting found in the newly released GNU ccScript 2.4.1, it is now possible to create stand-alone telephony applications which never need to use TGI. Hence, with this new development release, we have also made it possible to optionally remove TGI support at compile time using the configure script. This further enables the creation of highly optimized GNU Bayonne servers for use in embedded and turnkey telephony applications.

This initial development release offers a GNU Bayonne plugin that works with the Postgresql database system. Additional plugins to support mysql, or even unixodbc, should be forthcoming. We are looking for help in creating plugins for many additional database libraries.

 
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