J. Christopher Ramming

Bio: J. Christopher Ramming is an academic researcher from AT&T Labs. The author has contributed to research in topics: The Internet & System integration testing. The author has an hindex of 6, co-authored 7 publications receiving 287 citations. Previous affiliations of J. Christopher Ramming include Bell Labs.

Integrated web and telephone service creation

Abstract: We describe a system for creating, maintaining, and analyzing interactive services that require access from multiple devices. The system augments the infrastructure of the World Wide Web with Mawl, an application-oriented language for specifying form-based services in a device-independent manner, and TelePortal, a software/hardware platform that enables telephone access to Web content via standard interactive voice response (IVR) platforms. Service creators link service logic and presentation with templates written in an extension of the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). HTML is extended with marks for dynamic content (Meta-HTML) and with marks specific to a user interface or access device. Documents to be interpreted by TelePortal are written in the Phone Markup Language (PML). Together, Mawl and TelePortal provide a new way to create integrated services, as well as IVR services. The ability to develop such services in a single environment appears to be unique.

Two Application languages in software production

Abstract: PRL5 is an application-oriented language used to maintain the integrity of databases in the AT&T 5ESSTM telecommunications switch. PRL5 is unusual in that it was explicitly designed to eliminate a number of different coding and inspection steps rather than simply to improve individual productivity. Because PRL5 replaced an earlier high-level language named PRL, which in turn replaced a combination of English and C on the same project, it is possible to trace the effect of several fundamentally different languages on this single project. The linguistic evolution has been away from languages describing computation toward a "declarative" high-level language that has been deliberately restricted to accommodate the requirements of certain analyses. Algorithms for checking database constraints are no longer specified by human developers; instead, code is generated from static representations of the constraints themselves. These constraint descriptions can be used in more than one way, whereas a program to check constraints is useful only for performing that particular computation. In effect, PRL5 allows the re-use of project information at a high level, before it has been specialized into particular implementations. The effects of this re-use on quality, interval, and cost are tangible. A key lesson is that application-oriented languages should not be designed to describe computation, they should be designed to express useful facts from which one or more computations can be derived.

Specification-based testing of reactive software: tools and experiments

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Domain-specific languages: an annotated bibliography

Abstract: We survey the literature available on the topic of domain-specific languages as used for the construction and maintenance of software systems. We list a selection of 75 key publications in the area, and provide a summary for each of the papers. Moreover, we discuss terminology, risks and benefits, example domain-specific languages, design methodologies, and implementation techniques.

Voice browser for interactive services and methods thereof

Abstract: A voice browser to process a markup language document. A voice browser includes a network fetcher unit to retrieve information from a destination of an information source. A parser unit is communicatively coupled to the network fetcher to parse the retrieved information based on predetermined syntax. The parser unit generates a tree structure representing the hierarchy of the retrieved information. An interpreter unit and a state machine are also used. The method includes the steps of retrieving and parsing a markup language document to determine at least one user input, determining whether the user input corresponds to a predetermined grammar, and using the predetermined grammar when the user input corresponds to the predetermined grammar. The method of determining a grammar is based upon phonetic rules and pronunciation. The grammar is sent to a speech recognition engine and compared to a user input.

Method of accessing a target entity over a communications network

Abstract: A method of accessing a target entity over a communication network employs a distributed database system similar top the DNS of the Internet; indeed the DNS may be used as the required distributed database. The distributed database stores records, each associated with a corresponding domain name and holding communication data for use in accessing a target entity. Each of these domain names are related to a respective number string from which it can be derived by a process including parsing at least a substantial portion of the number string into at least a part of said domain name. Upon the input of a number indicative of a target entity, the related domain name is formed by parsing the number and the domain name is then used to retrieve the corresponding communication data from the DNS-type distributed database system. This data is then used in accessing the target entity. In one embodiment the communication network is a telephone network and the target entity is a called party; in this case, the number string comprises a dialed number and the retrieved communication data is a URI indicative of the location on the Internet of a current telephone number for the target party, the URI once retrieve being used to access the current telephone number over the Internet for use in setting up a call to the target party.

Embedded web server

Abstract: An embedded graphical user interface employs a World-Wide-Web communications and display paradigm. The development environment includes an HTML compiler which recognizes and processes a number of unique extensions to HTML. The HTML compiler produces an output which is in the source code language of an application to which the graphical user interface applies. A corresponding run-time environment includes a server which serves the compiled HTML documents to a browser.

Static approximation of dynamically generated Web pages

Abstract: Server-side programming is one of the key technologies that support today's WWW environment. It makes it possible to generate Web pages dynamically according to a user's request and to customize pages for each user. However, the flexibility obtained by server-side programming makes it much harder to guarantee validity and security of dynamically generated pages.To check statically the properties of Web pages generated dynamically by a server-side program, we develop a static program analysis that approximates the string output of a program with a context-free grammar. The approximation obtained by the analyzer can be used to check various properties of a server-side program and the pages it generates.To demonstrate the effectiveness of the analysis, we have implemented a string analyzer for the server-side scripting language PHP. The analyzer is successfully applied to publicly available PHP programs to detect cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and to validate pages they generate dynamically.