[asterisk-doc] New portal for Asterisk: The Future of Telephony (online HTML)

[Leif Madsen]

Gavin Henry wrote:
> It's always a hard and fast moving target to address. I wish you luck.
> Will this list and a wiki be used for general review?

We'll probably just use this list for the general review. This time around we're 
hoping that the snapshots will allow for better transparency as we write the 
book, and allow more review throughout the writing process as opposed to trying 
to review a whole book in a period of 2 weeks.

I don't think we'll use a wiki as the book will be written in DocBook. The 
snapshots will most likely be done either after a major rework of a section, or 
when we complete a milestone (like completion of a chapter). This way we can 
point people to the section that changed, and all who are interested can focus 
on that part specifically.

>> We do talk about this a bit, and we'll probably do a bit more of it.
>> That's certainly an interesting topic.
> 
> Yeah. I'm sick of hearing * can only do 200 concurrent calls. Baaa....

Agreed! We briefly cover the benchmarking thing as you mentioned, but if we can 
get a test environment setup and load test Asterisk 1.2, 1.4, and 1.6.x to show 
the advanced made between the various versions, I think that will give us enough 
data for a nice graph :)

>>> Advanced:
>>>
>>> 1. An Advanced edition may cover something about OpenSIPS or Kamailio
>>> and other sip proxies using Asterisk.
>>>
>> This is something to give some serious thought to, but the simple fact
>> is that all those SER-based projects are pretty complicated, and our
>> book (as with any book) needs to be true to it's subject. I think what
>> you might find us doing is giving a more thorough treatment of the SIP
>> protocol itself, but we'll see what time (and skill allow). It's a good
>> suggestion, though.
> 
> I appreciate that too. Now IAX2 is a proper RFC, I'd like to see both SIP and
> IAX2 get more details. But again, it's a trade off. Beginner book or
> Advanced. Don't
> want to scare people and set the barrier too high.

One of the sections I want to expand upon is configurations and topology 
scenarios to show "real life" scenarios that people often experience and have 
issues with. If we can reproduce those topologies, then we should be able to 
show how to configure them.

>>> 2. Linking different PBXs together.
>>>
>> Yep. Good idea and one we've got on the planned outline.
> 
> Nice. Lot's of things can be done, but maybe just two are needed:
> 
> 1. Connection/extending a system over some form of VoIP, H.323, SIP
> etc. I'm thinking
> about Avaya here.

While H.323 is not very popular in North America (or Europe?), I think it is 
still popular in countries of the former Soviet Union, and the like, so I think 
covering this, at least in a basic, "this is how you get H.323 compiled and 
configured" would be useful, but we'll be focusing mostly on SIP, and to a 
lesser extent on IAX2, and H.323 lesser still.

> 2. Connection/extending a system over PRI/BRI/analogue etc.

I agree here. And there is a lot more hardware available now, and is a lot more 
robust, so I think covering this kind of stuff in more detail would be a welcome 
addition to the book.


Thanks for the feedback!

Leif Madsen.