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With increasing competition between modern IP-enabled desk phone manufacturers, the microbrowser feature has snuck in relatively unnoticed and underutilized. The principle is simple: physical desk phones construct interactive menus on a phone by pulling XML over HTTP or the like. Contending interests, however, lead this technology amiss: every vendor’s XML differs, microbrowsers are often quirky, and available features vary vastly. The Micromenus framework exists as an Adhearsion helper and aims to abstract the differences between vendors’ phones. For this very particular development domain (i.e., creating menus), Micromenus use a very simple Ruby-based “Domain Specific Language” to program logic cleanly and independent of any phone brands. Below is a simple example Micromenu: |
image 'company-logo' item "Call an Employee" do # Creates a list of employees as callable links from a database. Employee.find(:all).each do |someone| # Simply select someone to call that person on your phone. call someone.extension, someone.full_name end end item "Weather Information" do call "Hear the weather report" do play weather_report("Portland, OR") end item "Current: " + weather("Portland, OR")[:current][:temp] end item "System Uptime: " + `uptime` |
A list item displays in two ways. If given only a text String, Micromenus renders only |
a text element. If the arguments contain a do/end block of nested information, that text becomes a link to a sub-page rendering that nested content. A call item also has two uses, each producing a link which, when selected, initiates a call. When call receives no do/ end block, it simulates physically dialing the number given as the first argument. When a do/end block exists and all calls route through Adhearsion, selecting that item executes the dialplan functionality within the block. This is a great example of how handling the dialplans and on-screen microbrowsers within the same framework pays off well. From this example we can see a few other neat things about Micromenus: |
• Micromenus support sending images. If the requesting phone does not support |
images, the response will have no mention of them. |
• All Adhearsion helpers work here, too. We use the weather helper in this example. • The Micromenus sub-framework can use Adhearsion’s database integration. |