[asterisk-dev] ARI Stasis Application Examples and Tutorials

[Nir Simionovich]

Hi All,

  I'm not sure if the dev list is the proper list of this, however, due to
the fact that the issue at hand
revolves around documentation and proper usage, I think bringing it up here
is a good place.

  So, during the past few days, I've been trying to implement the Dial
application using ARI. So,
I'm aware I'm not the only one, but I'm the one trying to do it using
PHPARI - naturally.

  In any case, I managed to write the functionality - reaching an issue
where if I disconnect the
first bridge handled by the stasis app, it will kill all the other bridges
as well. I was wondering why
that happens. I then realized that part of the my stasis loop
implementation is just wrong, and it's
not because PHPARI is wrong, or ARI is wrong - it's wrong because it is a
WebSocket client.

  A stasis application, at least as I understand it - is a websocket client
- or consumer in that
respect. However, our consumer application is required to be able to handle
multiple sessions,
so, it now needs to be stateful on one hand, and 'multi-threaded' on the
other. The result is that
our 'client' application is actually a server in disguise.

  This is something that the ARI documentation and general usage concepts
is missing - I think
that we need to make ARI more accessible by explaining the basic concepts
better.

  Another thing, yesterday Scott and I were going through Matt's example of
the "bridge_dial" ARI
application. The fact that the ari-py is autogenerated makes it really hard
for a none-python (yours
truly) guy to follow along. Even Scott, who is fluent in Python had a bit
of trouble looking through the
logic of the app, specifically when seeing that a certain event overloads
an existing one - and some
other stuff that ari-py does.

  In other words, if we want to deprecate AGI/AMI at some point - or for a
better term, get people to
use ARI extensively - we need better examples. I'm working on adding
additional examples to PHPARI
for this, but we need simple, to the point, usage examples for ARI. For
example, examples that don't
go about and do something funky in the background, so that people can truly
learn from it.

  When I started with AGI and AMI, the one thing I liked was that I could
use BASH. ARI isn't such a thing,
and a WebSocket library is mandatory. But giving some basic concepts using
only that, would be
awesome.

  What do you think?

Nir
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