A communiqué from David Sugar describes the 'milestone 6' release of Bayonne, including a plugin which introduces BayonneXML for XML language support. Bayonne is the freely licensed multi-line voice response telephony server of the GNU project which "offers free, scalable, media independent software environment for development and deployment of telephony solutions for use with current and next generation telephone networks." Bayonne is also a component of GNU Enterprise, "a software and a modular architecture that provides automated support for most business processes (viz., integrated business software for human resources, payroll, inventory, purchasing, accounting, finance, planning, sales order entry, customer support, forecasting, and other business processes)." In the sixth milestone release of Bayonne, the developers "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."

From the Manual: "Bayonne, the telecommunications application server of the GNU project, will offer a free, scalable, media independent software environment for development and deployment of telephony solutions for use with current and next generation telephone networks. Bayonne already offers a fully distributed application server for use today with multi-line telephony cards from many vendors under free operating systems. To speed development and simplify deployment of custom applications, Bayonne offers it's own native script interpreter which may be directly extended thru modular DSO plugins and TGI based applications. TGI, 'Telephony Gateway Interface', allows Bayonne to be easily integrated with other system resources, such as web servers, databases, and other application servers using standard and familiar tools that are well understood such as Perl, TCL, and Python. Bayonne can be used today most completely under GNU/Linux with an ever wider selection of telephony hardware. Bayonne has also been built under, and can be used with, FreeBSD and the new Voicetronix API. Bayonne is highly portable and will compile under most multi-threaded POSIX operating systems, including Solaris and Unixware. As Bayonne's telephony hardware and next generation media support broadens, support for functional deployment under operating systems beyond GNU/Linux will continue to increase..."

Comment from David Sugar (Bayonne Maintainer): "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..."

On GNUe Technology: "GNUe is an n-tier client server enterprise system. The user interface is provided by GNUe Forms client. The GNUe Forms client talks directly to the GEAS (enterprise application server) using CORBA technology. GEAS currenty connects to SQL92 relational databases using CORBA and libGDA for transport and API abstraction respectively. GEAS also manages the business objects which consist of data and business rules. The backend use of a standard SQL92 relational database provides standard interfaces for external systems and leverages current IT practices and staff. GNUe Forms (GNUeF) is the primary user interface to the GNU Enterprise system. It is comprised of a user interface client called 'GNUe Forms' and a form designer client called 'GNUe Form Designer.' GNUe Forms Client is responsible for displaying output and accepting user input. All user interaction with the system will be handled by the GNUe Forms client. The form definition files are XML format and stored on a central server or locally. The future GNUe Forms Designer will allow a developer to produce the XML based form definition files utilizing a graphical user interface (GUI). GNUe Application Server (GEAS) is a data abstraction layer and allows GNUe to utilize single API to all data sources (local and remote). So the client has one set of calls it uses, but can access different vendors SQL databases or even CVS or XML files. Similar to Borland's Database Engine or other data abstraction tiers. GEAS is transparent to the user. It will run with multiple instances and do load balancing. GNUe Reports (GNUeR) shares many features with GNUe Forms. It is comprised of a report designer and a client that generates the requested output. Report definition files are also XML based. And programs can communicate directly with the XML reports definition language much like they can with GNUe Forms. The major difference is that GNUe Reports is optimized to handle large amounts of data and run separately from the GNUe Forms Client. GNUe Enterprise Wide Office Kommunication (EWOK) supports integration of non-transaction based ad-hoc communications utilizing fax, email and paging other non-network communications with GNUe. Transaction based external communications (EDI and XML-EDI) will utilize the Data Transformation Tool. To use EWOK the user would typically hit the EWOK button in the Forms client and a pop-up window would appear with destination and information selection options. This may be replaced with Bayonne. This change is in process, see the news section for more information..." [from the FAQ document]