[asterisk-dev] Newbie Developer Resource?

[Grey Man]

On Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 4:10 AM, David Phillips
<phillips.david.lee at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks Greyman.  I appreciate it. What I'm actually looking for is how to do
> special outbound calling handling with asterisk.  I don't want to actually
> change the asterisk server itself.  I think I want to use AGI's ?  I'm not
> certain, but I *think* so.  Basically I'm wanting to do the following:
>
> 1. Get data from mySQL database (I already have an example program for this)
> 2. make an outbound call (I already have an example with a simple 'call
> file')
> 3. detect human or answering machine (and update the db appropriately)
> 4. play an audio file (I have an example of this too).
> 5. Prompt the listener to record a response (I DON'T have an example of
> this).
> 6.  write the response to a WAV file so I can retrieve it via FTP.
>
> I think that's about it.  Like I said, I have some sample code to get me
> started, I was just wondering for a good starting place for scripting with
> asterisk.
>
> Dave
>

Hi Dave,

AGI, or FastAGI if you want to run your AGI program on a different
server which is normally a good idea, is almost certainly the correct
answer if you want to run some custom business logic. However in your
case most of what you have described can be done in the Asterisk
dialplan using functions already provided. If you can keep fulfill
your needs with the Asterisk dialplan functions you can save yourself
quite a bit of work since using AGI will mean writing a new program
and all the intergration, testing and deployment issues that come with
it (I'm not saying it's overly difficult and I can add new FastAGI
functions in minutes but when starting from scratch there is a
learning curve).

The best site for dialplan functions is ww.voip-info.org and if you do
have questions regarding AGI or dialplans you're best to post them to
the Asterisk-Users list. This dev list is for the development of
Asterisk itself rather than development with the interfaces provided
by Asterisk. Seemingly a small distinction but you've already
experienced what occurs when you get it wrong ;-).

Regards,

Greyman.