[asterisk-dev] CSTA - Worth looking at again?

[Tim Panton]

On 16 Oct 2008, at 02:16, John Todd wrote:

>
> [This has come up a few times over the last 4 years on this list and
> others, but it has never before had enough people look at it who
> understood perhaps what the benefits were, so I drag it out again
> here for your amusement...]
>
>
> Would a CSTA interface (or in a variant, uaCSTA) be a useful API
> layer for Asterisk?  Would some of the PineMango goals be workable
> with a CSTA method as the "language" portion of the communication?
> Or would it merely be a monolithic module that would talk to the API
> components as a discrete consumer/producer of messages to the various
> components?  I'm largely ignorant of the details of where the API
> discussion would layer into what something like CSTA could offer -
> feel free to say that these two concepts are non-intersecting and
> I'll drop it.
>
>
> Regardless of CSTA's role in a potential "next-generation" fruit-like
> API project, it still bears examination as a potential interface for
> other Enterprise-ish platforms.  Microsoft's OCS/LCS Platform uses a
> variant of uaCSTA over SIP, as does Avaya, Cisco, Mitel, and
> others(?- need a list).  Of course, I'm not so interested in those
> legacy PBX platforms, but the tools that third-party companies are
> producing to bolt onto them are what sound like has some value.
> Creating a CSTA interface to Asterisk would allow quick grafting of
> "industry standard" tools onto an inexpensive and flexible OSS
> back-end.
>
> Comments?
>
>
> Base page:
>   http://www.ecma-international.org/activities/Communications/TG11/cstaIII.htm
>
>
> Here's an introduction (194kb):
>  http://www.ecma-international.org/activities/Communications/TG11/CSTAoverview.pdf
>
>
> This seems to be some of the documentation (4mb, 767 pages!):
>  http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-269.htm
>
> CPAN module for CSTA (incomplete - Phase I only - need Phase III)
>  http://search.cpan.org/~leifj/Net-CSTA-0.04/lib/Net/CSTA.pm
>

This is exactly the sort of thing we need to be able to implement at the
framework level, based on the pinemango API level.

If PineMango doesn't give us enough scope to implement CSTA, then it
has failed (IMHO).



Tim.