Many months ago, IBM announced that they were open sourcing and donating their Reusable Dialog Components library to the Jakarta project at the Apache Software Foundation. Finally, version 1.0 of the RDC has been released.
The RDC is a JSP tag library that simplifies the development of server side code for generating VoiceXML documents for use in voice and multimodal applications. The RDC originated as a bunch of static VoiceXML files. Nearly two years ago, someone in the Speech group at IBM told me that they had decided to switch to using JSPs to dynamically generate the VoiceXML documents. Dynamic generation is the only way to go for complex VoiceXML applications.
Although my SoccerPhone and PhoneBlogger projects use static VoiceXML files, a lot of the work in those applications is being done in Python. The dialog portions of those apps are fairly simple. I’ll probably port part or all of one of these apps to use RDC to get a feel for what it’s like to develop with.