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Archive for May, 2011

27 May 2011

by Dave

Friday fun with Scala syntax

It’s Friday – time to kick back and relax with two fun Scala programs we put together for your amusement.

Scala has a pretty flexible syntax (although not as flexible as Racket’s, of course) that makes it popular amongst proponents of DSLs. Not all DSLs have to be serious, however, as I’m about to prove.

First up is Noel’s original concept – proof of his love for DSLs, expressed in purest code:

 class A(num: Int) { def Scala = "It's s" + ("o" * num) + " much fun!" } object I { def <(num: Int) = new A(num) } I <3 Scala // ==> "It's sooo much fun!" 

Second is a simpler work that I call “The Startled Lolcat”:

 object O { def o = "What has been seen, cannot be unseen." } O.o // ==> "What has been seen, cannot be unseen."

Posted in Code, Fun, Scala | Comments Off on Friday fun with Scala syntax

23 May 2011

by Noel

The Future of VoIP Phone Configuration Interfaces

We’ve recently completed a very fun and interesting job working on a new interface for managing VoIP phone systems. We have a VoIP phone, provided by Loho, who were also our client for this project. It’s great — we can forward calls to our mobiles, cart the phone around with us (plug it into a network connections and it just works), and it even emails us our voice messages. The only thing not great about our phone is the configuration interface. Luckily, that’s what this project set out to solve.

The brief was to implement an elegant online phone configuration system. Alex, Director at Loho, provided the vision. We provided two weeks of development time, which was enough to create a working prototype. Alex has asked us to not give away too many details about the system, but I can show you a few screenshots. First up, here’s the main screen:

The very stylish main menu of the VoIP administration tool we've built for Loho.

The very stylish main menu of the VoIP administration tool we’ve built for Loho.

Doesn’t give away much, does it? A bit more interesting is a detail of editing a configuration:

Also very stylish: editing the configuration of a voice menu

Also very stylish: editing the configuration of a voice menu

Here I’m editing a voice menu — one of those “Press 1 if you’re interested in giving us all your money” type things.

We think we’ve created a very nice system. Loho tell us they were overwhelmed with interest at a recent tradefair, suggesting we’re not alone in our opinion. While the interface is an important aspect of the work, the backend (which I can talk about!) is just as important. The main task was defining a data model to capture the rich feature set that Loho provide. This turned out to be very similar to designing a programming language and its intermediate representation. For example, we use a continuation-passing style representation to avoid maintaining a stack on the server side. Our representation distinguishes between tail calls and normal function calls to avoid excessive resource consumption on the VoIP side. Relational databases don’t do a very good job of storing recursive datastructures, like the AST of a programming language, so we used Mongo for the data store. In addition to its flexible data model, Mongo is web scale which has given us an immediate status boost at local programmer meetups.

The backend code is implemented in Scala and Lift. There are actually two interfaces to the service. One is the nice interface the users see, and the other is a REST interface that is called by the Asterisk AGI scripts that implement the VoIP functionality. The Asterisk system doesn’t handle all the functionality we represent internally, so the REST interface includes a small interpreter that executes intermediate steps till we arrive at something Asterisk deals with.

Posted in Business, Code, Design, Functional Programming, Scala | Comments Off on The Future of VoIP Phone Configuration Interfaces

23 May 2011

by Noel

Internship This Summer at Loho

Our friends at Loho are looking for an intern over summer. We’vepreviously blogged about the (fun and interesting) work we’ve done for Loho: using ScalaLift, and a heavy does of Javascript we’ve created a really simple interface for setting up complex VoIP services. (All credit goes to Alex for the great concept — our work is simply implementing his vision.) The internship could extend this work, or address other parts of the stack right down to mucking around with VoIP hardware. It’s an awesome chance to play with a lot of exciting technology. If you fit the bill (student, free for 8-10 weeks over summer, can relocate to Cambridge) get in touch with Alex at Loho. If you get the internship and decide to focus on the Scala/Lift parts we’ll certainly help you get to grips with the code base.

Posted in General | Comments Off on Internship This Summer at Loho