[asterisk-users] Recent additions to the Digium Asterisk development team

[Barzilai]

Jean-Michel Hiver wrote:
> Which makes me think, what is the real use of AEL. I have taken a look 
> at it, and it makes asterisk's config file almost as unreadable as SER.
>
> What exactly does AEL do that a well written AGI / FastAGI app doesn't?
>
> I would think (but I'm surely wrong) that it would be better to do 
> work on  having well defined APIs that allow us to script Asterisk 
> (such as AGI and the Manager interface) rather than invent Yet Another 
> Pseudo Programming Language - which is going to be an endless task... 
> Don't you think?

First, congratulations to the new members.

In my case, the promising existence of AEL2 is what made me decide that 
I could use Asterisk to do what I needed (very complex IVR's + Call 
Center with dozens of services answered by many agents) and not having 
to do it in a spaghetti extensions.conf measuring 5000 lines of nonsense.

And now that you mention "well defined API", a good way to have a 
manageable one is to have a "good architecture", which Asterisk has not. 
I understand this is for historical reasons because Asterisk has grown 
fast and without order, but having Dial, Answer, MYSQL, AGI, Set, and 
VoiceMail (!!!!!!!!!!!) at the same architectural level IS NOT a good 
architecture... if I want a monolith I'll watch "2001: A Space Odyssey".

At the moment Asterisk is still a very useful system, but if people keep 
throwing new stuff at it because "I want to have this cool feature from 
the dialplan so I created app_XyZ"... how long will it be before it 
crumbles down from its own weight?

So, yes, a scripting language (AEL or something better) is very useful, 
and it should rely on a good API which should rely on a good 
architecture.  [Fast]AGI and the Manager API, each  give partial solutions.

I also want to add that I saw a great improvement from versions 1.0.x to 
versions 1.2.x. Let's see what 1.4 will bring, but  I hope a 2.0 version 
with a complete rearchitecturing could finally make Asterisk "the Apache 
of telephony" as I read somewhere.  (Or wait for the OpenPBX guys to 
awake from their coma).

Enough caffeine for tonight.

BarZ