CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

IIRC, Drupal-VOIP provided value on a few different fronts:
  (a) Drivers for different VOIP providers
  (b) Script engine for VOIP interactions. (This is necessary because HTTP is a series of stateless interactions -- but it's much easier to think of VOIP interactions as stateful/sequential.)
  (c) Small[?] apps which use the script-engine as well as FAPI, Node API, DBTNG, etc

My gut says that (a) and (b) would be amenable to packaging up as libraries that can be used in any PHP application or PHP framework (Drupal, Civi, Joomla, Symfony, etc) -- you could probably count on one hand the number of interfaces between the VOIP library and the host application. For example, perhaps a central part of the library is:

<?php
// FILE: Voip\VoipController.php
namespace Voip;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFOundation\Request as HttpRequest;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFOundation\Response as HttpResponse;

class VoipController {
  /**
   * @param VoipDriverRepositoryInterface $drivers a list of active VOIP service providers
   * @param VoipScriptRepositoryInterface $scripts a list the available VOIP scripts
   * @param VoipSessionRepositoryInterface $sessions a service which can store data about
   *     on-going VOIP interactions
   */
  function __construct($drivers, $scripts, $sessions) { ... }

  /**
   * Process an incoming notification from a VOIP service. The notification
   * will be parsed and examined to determine if it is part of an on-going VOIP session
   * or a new session. When the session is determined, control will be passed to
   * the appropriate VOIP script. 
   *
   * @param HttpRequest $request
   * @return HttpResponse
   */
  function receive(HttpRequest $request) { ... }
}

Any PHP application can instantiate VoipController and inject the required services. In a simple custom application, one might use hardcoded values:

<?php
// FILE: my-custom-voip-app.php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
$controller = new \Voip\VoipController(
  // Hard-code the details of our Twilio connection
  new \Voip\SimpleDriverRepository(array(
    new \Voip\TwilioDriver('myuser', 't0ps3cr3t')
  )),
  // Load VOIP scripts from files
  new \Voip\FileScriptRepository('/var/www/my-voip-scripts'),
  // Store session-state in memcache using hardcoded connection info
  new \Voip\MemcacheSessionRepository('localhost', '1234')
);
$request = \Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request::createFromGlobals();
$response = $controller->receive($request);
$response->send();

For the Drupal-integration, the implementation of DrupalVoipDriverRepository could load a list of VOIP drivers from YAML files using D8's new config API, and the DrupalVoipScriptRepository could retrieve a list of scripts using Node API.

--

This gets you reuse of (a)+(b) (assuming that I remembered the concepts well), but it may or may not get to the holy-grail of reusing the mini-apps. It frankly depends on the app. For a simple app that's written entirely in VOIP-script and doesn't require any web UI, it could probably work anywhere. But if the VOIP-script needs to append data to a Civi contact record and display a report in the admin's web browser, then I don't think there's a general solution to making the app look Drupal-native *and* Civi-native. However, if we focus the discussion on the specific requirements for specific apps, then maybe we could find ways.

--

You may have noticed that I didn't exactly speak about how the VOIP package could access the dependency-injection system or the presentation-layer in D8 or Civi. That's not really an accident. A key part of the design-aesthetic shared by Symfony and the new crop of PHP frameworks is to encourage the development of loosely-coupled libraries that don't depend directly on any framework.

I don't want to say it's impossible to do an all-purpose abstraction of forms and persistence in Civi and Drupal, but... suffice to say it's not gonna happen in time for GSoC 2014.

Thanks totten and jaapjansma for the useful feedback. We'll come back with more specific questions perhaps.

Cheers!

Thanks, Eileen. VoIP Drupal hasn't started on a D8 branch, and we are hoping to collaborate on this with them.