[asterisk-dev] Things Google

[Kevin P. Fleming]

On 10/11/2011 02:13 AM, David Bowerman wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Having recently put up my hand to look after things google
> (gtalk/jingle/xmpp etc) in Asterisk, I thought I'd seek a bit of
> feedback re its current state / feature set / direction.
>
> As I see it :-
>
> chan_jingle is pretty much cactus and doesn't appear to conform to
> XEP-166/167 (the jingle specs). You certainly cant call Asterisk from a
> jingle compliant end point.
>
> chan_gtalk is ok (right now) and seems to support Google Talk and Google
> Voice calls bi-directionally.
>
> res_jabber is a bit of a monster and provides 'client services' to both
> chan_gtalk and chan_jingle, IM Dialplan functionality, and distributed
> device state between Asterisk instances via XMPP pubsub. res_jabber is
> dependant on libiksemel, but has a bit of bloat around SASL / TLS
> support employing extra libraries, where libiksemel now does SASL / TLS
> negotiation natively as of version 1.4. I suspect it didnt when
> res_jabber was first written.
>
> So, in terms of a plan :-
>
> It would be good to have Asterisk support jingle (i.e XEP-166/167)
> properly. Should this remain a separate channel driver (chan_jingle) or
> be merged with chan_gtalk?

Is it true that Google Talk/Google Voice now support standard Jingle? If 
so, then moving to a single channel driver would be ideal. If not... 
yeah, chan_jingle needs to be fixed up to be XEP compliant.

> Should the channel drivers remain so closely tied to res_jabber? or
> should they stand alone, leaving res_jabber to do the IM and distributed
> device state stuff? simplification...

It makes sense for the underlying XMPP transport stuff to live in a 
resource module; whether the IM and device state bits should be there or 
not is debatable, but as long as they aren't costly to have loaded if 
they are not being used, there's no harm.

> Is now a good time to consider naming conventions. ie jabber should
> maybe be xmpp now? chan_gtalk chan_google ? etc.

Well.. changing module names causes backward compatibility issues, and 
users complain :-) In spite of that, I could see renaming res_jabber to 
res_xmpp (and possibly splitting the Jabber functionality into a new 
module).

>
> I'd appreciate some feed back on this as well as functionality which is
> not present. I see Google have gtalk video in beta for Android....

Fun!

-- 
Kevin P. Fleming
Digium, Inc. | Director of Software Technologies
Jabber: kfleming at digium.com | SIP: kpfleming at digium.com | Skype: kpfleming
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
Check us out at www.digium.com & www.asterisk.org