Tips for Investigation 5

• Work through or at least look at the first several tutorials at http://www.vxml.org/. You should keep this reference page handy as you are developing.  Note that the second tutorial has a bug: you must enclose the line "Please say your favorite South Park character's name." in a <prompt> tag.
• There are some very nice built-in grammars listed that you can find under the "GSL Grammar's" link in the left hand navigation bar at http://www.vxml.org/.  My sample application uses one of those.  Always use the GSL grammar type.  
• To achieve more freedom in design than the form structure allows, consider using universal grammars along with event handlers. There is an example of this in my example application (the link tags at the top that allow the user to say "main" and "done").  Note that if you're just doing this, you'll need to have a single form that can't accept input so that the call won't just be dropped immediately.  In my application this is the "Again" form.
• All of your inline scripts and grammars should use the <![CDATA[ ... ]]> notation. It will save you from wasting time debugging strange errors (unless they are VERY simple).
• The W3CSchools website has good Javascript tutorials, and they provide webpages where you can mess around with Javascript and execute small pieces of it (http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/default.asp is the reference, http://www.w3schools.com/JS/tryit.asp?filename=tryjs_formattext is one of the live Javscript pages.). This is a good way to test bits of Javascript and debug them without going through the whole upload-call-view log cycle.
• When programming in Javascript, you can get detailed error information via your browser's error console. Also note that at Voxeo, all of your variables must be declared using the "var" keyword, or via xml tags.
• To run your applications you can either use their file hosting service or you can use your HMC public_html web space.  I STRONGLY recommend the latter (using your HMC web space), as their file system seems to have a long lag time before it updates changes.
• The debugging cycle at Voxeo is generally: 
1. Update your file, save it, and upload it. 
2. Call the application number (use speeddial, or at least write it on a piece of paper). Interact appropriately with your application, until bad behavior or an error occurs. 
3. You can use the Application Debugger or the Files, Logs, Reports tool to help you with your debugging.

• Make only SMALL changes between each test.  Test often.
• One note on grammars: the power of the speech recognition is largely dependent on constraints introduced by the grammar. This means that the more ambiguous your grammar, the more likely it is to make mistakes. As an example, when testing the given datetime grammar, I tried the phrase "rutabega". Instead of failing, the grammar produced "May 3".  With the full date.grammar, you'll find it almost always interprets whatever you say as something.  This might not be a bad thing, but if you want to be sure you're not making mistakes, try to limit how much of your grammar is active at any particular moment, when you can.

Good luck with this assignment, and if you're having trouble with something, email cs124help@cs.hmc.edu. Also, don't worry too much about building elegant grammars. Feel free to brute-force your grammars to get them to work, and if you find something that would be incredibly painful to implement in a grammar, it's fine to note that you couldn't reasonably accomplish that part of your design and use a simpler placeholder. The assignment says to note things that are impossible, but when it comes to grammars, if you're spending hours trying to get something seemingly simple to work, it falls under the category of "not reasonably possible".