[asterisk-dev] AstriDevCon 2014: Agenda item Deprecate AMI/AGI (Ben Klang)

[Daniel McFarlane]

Hi,

I've been reading recent emails on the developers list and just wanted 
to add my 2 cents:

While the AGI approach was never useful for my needs, I recently 
finished 2 years of almost straight development time to develop a 
full-fledged call answering solution and I would be VERY annoyed (to say 
the least) if AMI was deprecated!  While many people do web programming 
due to it's simplicity, I find a C-based program is ALWAYS more 
elegant.  As such, AMI was the ONLY interface to Asterisk that was 
useful to building the interface we needed (keep in mind that web socket 
support for C-based applications is VERY poor!  We've researched it for 
another application & found that we were not able to do what we needed 
it for!) & we are just starting to enjoy the benefits of the work.  I'm 
not saying web development doesn't have it's merits, as some 
applications demand it, but in my opinion a C-based program is better 
catered for someone using it 24-7.  So please, if you want to deprecate 
something, don't do so to AMI!

Note: While I'd have no problem myself with deprecating the dial-plan 
(actually, if I didn't have to deal with it at all & the complexities of 
requiring a channel to be in async AGI mode before issuing an AMI 
command to it, then that would have very much simplified my 
development!), I can understand why a lot of people would be adverse to 
such a change.

In summary, I think having different ways of controlling Asterisk are 
required, depending on the application:

- AMI for those wishing to interface with a more elegant C-based 
application.
- Something like the dial plan for those wishing to use Asterisk as is, 
without developing an external interface.
- ARI or AGI for web-based solutions (hence why deprecating AGI probably 
wouldn't be negative, being that they are 2 solutions to the same 
ends..but DEFINITELY keep the AMI as it's purpose/use is different).

Whatever you do, please keep the AMI interface!

Thank You!


On 10/28/2014 06:03 PM, Ben Langfeld wrote:
> On 28 October 2014 19:47, Derek Andrew <Derek.Andrew at usask.ca 
> <mailto:Derek.Andrew at usask.ca>> wrote:
>
>     What is the alternative to the dial plan? Is everyone talking
>     about getting rid of the statements like:
>     exten => s,1,
>
>     what is the alternative?
>
>
> Remote applications based on APIs like ARI. This is the start of the 
> discussion, and please remember that nothing has been decided or even 
> presented as a robust plan yet. This is brain-storming.
>
> Additionally, note that the original proposal was to deprecate AMI/AGI 
> in favour of ARI once it is feature complete with those protocols; an 
> entirely lesser change than the removal of the dialplan in its entirety.
>
>
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