Quinn Weaver, Dido @ CodeCon 2006, 12:30pm Sunday

Continuing prejudicial CodeCon session previews:

Quinn Weaver: Dido, 12:30pm Sunday @ CodeCon 2006

Dido grew out of a frustration with the open-source telephony platform Asterisk's dialplan system... I quickly realized that what I wanted to do--reordering menu options in voice menu, by popularity--was impossible in Asterisk... I ended up creating Dido, a radically new system that makes use of declarative XML templates, interspersed with Perl code that generates more XML. The result is a programming model that mimics the way dynamic Web pages are written...

Very little descriptive info on the project website, but from the above I'm guessing the essence is: make call-in voice-response systems as easy to author as dynamic web pages, without arbitrary limitations as imposed by previous offerings. The code is available for download, and "[t]he audience will be able to call into the demo system during the talk, using their cell phones, and traverse it independently" -- which is exactly what a demo of this functionality should include.

For what it's worth, there's nothing wrong with this project name! No obvious name collisions in the tech domain nor prominent untoward connotations in other meanings of 'dido'.

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