[Asterisk-Users] PBX Console

[Mark Spencer]

> And run X and VNC on the server to suck up both server and network
> resources?
>
> Yuck.  Why not just have a web interface?  Or build your own protocol
> for the GUI to use across the network.

I was merely trying to suggest what could be done using what has already
been written.  The X+VNC+Gastman solution would certainly be somewhat
resource intensive, but so long as you have a relatively small number of
users, and would be operating in a LAN or relatively high speed WAN
environment, it would work -- and work today.

> The CGI web interface benefits from the fact that HTTP is a mature
> protocol, and suffers from the fact that it doesn't save state.  With
> your own protocol, you can notify the gui of updates without resending
> all of the data.

HTML is generally a sufficiently compact protocol, however, that the
overhead of sending more text is presumably not "that big a deal".

> With your own protocol for a client/server approach, the GUI can be text
> or java or Windows or X or OS/2 or Aqua or Amiga or ... Of course, the
> same can be said for the CGI web interface. :-)

Here, clearly, the logical protocol would be the existing management
protocol itself, assuming you're trying to reduce network and server
resource overhead, but this requires writing some sort of java or even
native app (e.g. gastman) to interpret and display the data.  No ETA at
this point for such a program that is cross-platform -- certainly not
beyond Linux/Windows.

Mark