Telephony Isn't All Talk for Java Developers
Java programmers can work their way into the voice-to-data world without investing a lot of money in tools. An expert shows you how
By Lee Anne Phillips
[Editor's Note: Lee Anne Phillips is Director of Publications at Voxeo Corp., a company that provides telephone access to corporate networks and Web applications for businesses. Voxeo provides a free testing environment for these types of applications at community.voxeo.com. See our listing of other, competing VSP companies and services at the right.]
Java is an ideal tool for interactive Web site design, but how many Java developers have wished that they could access the brave new world of telephone-enabled applications without buying a bunch of new hardware and learning a whole new set of skills?
Luckily, you don't have to mortgage the farm and go back to school anymore. New voice service providers (VSPs) are making it possible for you to drive telephone-enabled applications from existing Web sites, often with minimal recoding. Instead of writing directly to complicated telephony hardware APIs, the Java developer can simply use Java to write code containing high-level procedure calls in a simple dedicated telephony language.
The following application will demonstrate how a developer can use Java servlets or even JavaBeans to dynamically create a telephone application. Examples of this kind of application include unified messaging, Internet call waiting, web-to-phone notifications, virtual call centers, broadcast fax or voice messages, and multimedia conference calling.
Because these applications are Web-based, they can be customized, linked, and integrated as easily as traditional Web applications.
It is common for companies to offer services over the phone via menus traversed using the phone's keypad. Voice Browsers offer a great fit for the next generation of call centers, which will become Voice Web portals to the company's services and related websites, whether accessed via the telephone network or via the Internet. Users will able to choose whether to respond by a key press or a spoken command. Voice interaction holds the promise of naturalistic dialogs with Web-based services.
Of course, any similar tool ranging from ASP to CGI also could have been used in our example here, but using Java servlets has many advantages for the developer. These include the availability of robust Internet security and session management as well as the tremendous power and flexibility of the Java language itself.
Since this isn't a basic Java tutorial, we'll assume you know (or know how to find out) how to create a Java servlet or bean capable of responding to HTTP requests. If you need background, see Claude Duguay's DevX book review of "Developing Java Servlets" by James Goodwill (Macmillan, 1999). Goodwill's book includes a section on HTTP tunneling, followed by a discussion of the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) API. There's also an excellent tutorial and other information available from Sun Microsystems.
Sun Microsystems
