VoiceObjects Back-End Integration - Part I: Overview
This is a shortened excerpt of the Blog Article VoiceObjects Back-End Integration - Part I: Overview from Jens Bäcker in the VoiceObjects Developer Blog on http://developers.voiceobjects.com.
Please read the whole article there!
Introduction
When you are implementing a phone self-service application, it is virtually certain that your application will need to communicate with some kind of back-end system. You might need to read data from your CRM system to get customer information, read data from your billing system to present information about the caller's last bill, make transactions (e.g. book a flight, change a price plan, or transfer money), read or write to a database, etc. Except for services that are just presenting static information, back-end integration is required everywhere. So as this topic seems to be omnipresent, let's take a closer look at how you can integrate back-end systems with VoiceObjects.
This post is the first one in a series about back-end integration with VoiceObjects (based on release 9.1). The series will give a detailed overview of the different ways that VoiceObjects provides for back-end integration. It will explore the differences between the approaches, provide guidelines when to use which approach, and provide detailed use-case driven examples for each of them.
The following sections provide a brief overview of the types of back-end integration available with VoiceObjects.
Please read additionally the relevant parts of the online help:
Connector Types
Java Connector
A Java Connector allows the execution of a Java Bean for back-end integration.
CGI Connector
A CGI Connector uses a web server as back-end integration layer.
Web Service Connector
A Web Service Connector uses document-style SOAP web services for back-end integration.
Database Object
The Database object (introduced in VoiceObjects 9.1) allows direct access to a relational database management system (RDBMS) from a VoiceObjects application.
Feature Matrix
The following table shows a comparison of some of the features of the different types of back-end integration.
|
|
Java Connector |
CGI Connector |
Web Service Connector |
Database Object |
| No additional components/integration layers required |
X |
- |
(X)if back-end already provides web service interface |
X |
| No communication overhead |
X |
- |
- |
X |
| Independent of programming language for integration |
- |
X |
X |
- |
| Works with virtually any type of back-end system |
X |
X |
X |
- |
| No stability or performance impact on VO Server due to bad integration code |
- |
X |
X |
X |
| Architecture with dedicated data access layer |
X |
X |
X |
- |
| No programming required |
- |
- |
(X)if back-end already provides web service interface |
X(SQL only) |
Further Reading
More From This Series
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