Information Technology - Telecommunications and Information Exchange Between Systems - Using ECMA-323 (CSTA XML) in a Voice Browser Environment

Services for Computer Supported Telecommunications Applications are defined by Standard ECMA-269 and the XML Protocol for those services are defined by Standard ECMA-323.

In many cases, applications require only a small subset of the features standardized in CSTA. In a voice browser environment, processing speech (not call control) is usually the major focus of the application. For example, from a CSTA feature perspective, an application may simply need to answer an incoming call and then later clear it.

As these speech-centric applications evolve they can use additional, more advanced, features standardized by CSTA that are provided by CSTA-conformant communications platforms. Since ECMA-269 and ECMA-323 are relatively large standards (combined over 1100 pages), it is a challenge for application developers without prior knowledge of the CSTA standards to know where to find basic concepts that they need to understand in order to implement basic CSTA features. This TR illustrates how ECMA-323 can be used in a Voice Browser environment.

These concepts illustrated in this TR can be applied to any Voice Browser environment that provides an XML-based read/write messaging interface (i.e. CSTA Service Boundary) that supports asynchronous events from a CSTA conformant communication platform. SALT enabled browsers that implement a ECMA-323 interface for call control using the SALT smex mechanism is an example of a browser with this capability.

Throughout this TR the term ECMA-323 enabled voice browser is used, in a generic sense, to refer to browser implementation that support a CSTA conformant ECMA-323 interface. Examples are provided that show how ECMA-323 can be used in several different environments such as SALT-enabled browsers and CCXML.