Are you the kind of person who took apart gadgets when you were young, just to see what they looked like on the inside? Are you unafraid of getting your hands a little dirty to better understand how the cogs move the shafts? Then this article is for you!

Voxeo VoiceObjects Developer Edition provides you with an all-in-one framework for building, testing, deploying, and monitoring phone applications using multiple phone channels such as voice, texting, or mobile web. It does this in part by incorporating a full-fledged Voxeo VoiceObjects platform “under the hood”, configured and operated in such a way that you do not need to see or touch it for all standard tasks. Just like the motor in your car it just runs whenever you turn the key, and the only maintenance required is an oil change every now and then. Yet the hood isn’t welded shut, and if you really want to you can sneak a peek inside. As a first step what we’ll do today is to create a Control Center entry for the embedded server, so you can watch its status and activity.

The Control Center is the graphical component that lets you monitor and control VoiceObjects servers, either on their own or in clusters. A detailed description of the functions and capabilities can be found within the Deployment Guide.
To configure a Control Center connection in Voxeo VoiceObjects Developer Edition, open the Eclipse preferences and go to the VoiceObjects section.

 

The bottom half of the pane lists all configured Control Center connections; initially (as shown in the screen shot) this list is empty. Click “Add…” to add a new connection. This brings up a new window in which to configure the connection.

For a connection to the embedded server we use the default VoiceObjects account voadmin (which, if you haven’t changed it, has the default password manager). Again by default, the port used by the embedded server is 8070. The Testing URL parameter is used by the Debug Viewer, so it isn’t strictly required but convenient to have in place. Finally, an Alias is required to identify the Control Center connection since you can have any number of them.

Once you have defined your Control Center connection and stored the updated preferences, your Control Center view should look like this:

 

If the Control Center view should not be open in your Eclipse perspective, you can open it from the Window menu.

The first tab within the Control Center view, called Server Manager, gives an overview of the VoiceObjects Server and the corresponding server instances. For the embedded server in Voxeo VoiceObjects Developer Edition, there is only a single server instance on localhost.
The second tab, called Service Manager, lists all services deployed on the server.

On the embedded server, there is only a single service called testService. Do not be unduly alarmed if it shows a yellow warning triangle as in the screen shot above – usually this simply means that you haven’t actually deployed an application yet, so the service doesn’t quite know what to do with itself. A situation that can easily be rectified by deploying an application using the Test Application entry in the Object Browser context menu:

This brings up the Test Monitor view – which actually is a simplified version of the Control Center you have just created!

When you switch back to the Control Center view and click the refresh button (the intertwining green arrows just above the drop-down selection box) your service entry should now be green and happy:

A right-click on the service opens up the context menu of available actions, including the ability to start a Debug Viewer session for the service. This does the exact same thing as clicking the Debug button in the Test Monitor view.

The other context menu entries will no doubt be tempting to play with, but we’d strongly recommend to at least read the documentation before doing so to avoid unexpected results. 
Don’t say we didn’t warn you!

After completing a call in the Debug Viewer and going back to the Control Center view (and possibly hitting the refresh button again) you’ll see your successful call listed in the Finished column.

In this final screen shot, you may notice the black lamp in the System DB Logging column that will show the tool tip Overridden when you place your mouse over it. This is due to the fact that while the service would like to write its statistics to the Infostore database, no appropriate connection has been configured for the server. This is something we’ll jointly rectify next week. Until then you may want to brush up your Infostore knowledge so you’re all set and ready to go.

With your new Control Center entry and the server’s activity in full view, you may be interested in seeing the wheels spin at higher speeds. Our next Developer Jam Session, scheduled for July 29 at 11am Eastern, will feature Andreas Volmer talking about the LoadTester component of the Voxeo VoiceObjects platform which, unsurprisingly, is designed for load testing your applications. Registration is highly recommended!

Tags: VoiceObjects Developer Edition 7.4, VoiceObjects Developer Edition 9.0

This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 10:11 am and is filed under Tips and tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.