[asterisk-dev] LUA in Asterisk. was [svn-commits] tilghman: trunk r88250 - in /trunk: ./ build_tools/ configs/ include/asterisk...

[Victor Sergeev]

Tilghman Lesher wrote:
> On Saturday 03 November 2007 06:57:56 Victor Sergeev wrote:
>   
>>  That's a great feature!
>>
>> Does it mean that Digium decided to replace AEL with LUA?
>>     
>
> No.
>   
I didn't mean literally but as a best practice for writing dial plans.
>   
>> It seems there'll be no sense to use AEL anymore if you can do the same in
>> real programming language.
>>     
>
> Are you saying that users shouldn't have a choice?
>   
I think the choice is really between two ways of describing dialplan:
original extensions.conf syntax
and dial plan described with some programing language like LUA, Python,
Perl, PHP, JS, etc.
It doesn't really matter what language it is, only matters how well it
is supported in Asterisk
and its popularity among community.

Dial plans written in one of the languages from the second group or in
AEL will look _very_ similar.
The significant difference is that LUA, Python, Perl, etc. are full
featured languages with thousands of libraries
and AEL is rather limited.

As LUA is already in Asterisk tree and will be in the next stable
release it seems to be an obvious choice for any new dialplan.
>   
>> It's strange that such major feature was added without any discussion with
>> development community (Nov 1 patch submitted, next day it is in the trunk).
>>     
>
> Here's your chance.  Discuss.
>
>   
>> Recently was discussed a topic about release cycle. IMO Asterisk should
>> have a roadmap for every release and such kind of addition should be
>> planned and announced to community.
>>     
>
> We don't roadmap, because we have no idea what code will be submitted to us
> during each development cycle.  Asterisk is strongly community-oriented as to
> its direction.  Submissions of new code are always welcome.
>
>   
To have a roadmap doesn't contradict to be community-oriented. Community
may define what it wants to see
in the next release and work on these goals. That will greatly help
Asterisk users/developers with their
migration/development plans. Any community submission beyond the roadmap
surely can be accepted in
the tree if they are going to be stable at the time of the release or at
least not affect the stability of core features.
> We did not know LUA was coming, but once it arrived, we added it.  If you want
> to submit a properly licensed implementation of the dialplan in another
> language, go right ahead.
>   
As I wrote above there is not too much difference in writing dialplan
using LUA, Perl, Python, etc.
and initially its better to put effort on making one of them stable and
full featured.