[Asterisk-Users] Happy New Asterisk Year!

[Olle E Johansson]

Friends in the Asterisk community!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!
(You have to emulate Allison saying that yourself, or try to copy me 
saying it with my Swedish accent!)

2005 was a great year for Asterisk. After more than a year's work, we 
released Asterisk 1.2 with lots of new functionality. We had two 
succesful community gatherings - Astricon Europe in June and Astricon 
2005 in October. A number of books on Asterisk was published, one as a 
free downloadable book. The number of Asterisk-related projects and 
products grew exponentially. The user base grew like crazy. It's amazing 
to be part of this, seeing it grow.

For 2006, we are planning two new releases. The first, Asterisk 1.4, is 
planned for the summer. As always, the changes and new features depends 
on the developers, their own needs or what their customers pay for. 
There are quite a lot of ideas floating around and it is very hard to 
say what will be done and implemented for the next release. That's the 
beauty and the problem of Open Source - the lack of a product marketing 
department than can decide the shape of a new version of the product. 
The users are pretty much in control.

I wanted to share some of my thoughts for the beginning of the year, 
telling you more about some projects I am working on. Remember though, I 
am just one of the growing number of Asterisk developers, and there are 
much development and brainstorming going on in the team. The new 
developer blogs that is coming up on asterisk.org will keep you up to 
date on all of us in the development team are up to. Asterisk.org will 
continue to improve and be a better tool for communication within the 
community.

* ASTUM: The Asterisk User Management module

A project I have been working on for a few months and that hopefully 
will be part of 1.4 is the ASTUM module. It's a module that focuses on 
the user, an individual that has one or several phones attached to 
Asterisk. Today, the user exists in too many places in the 
configuration, as well as properties belonging to that person. With AUM, 
you configure username, password, pin code, e-mail address and related 
properties once, then refer to it in the other configuration files by a 
user ID. Those modules will fetch the information from ASTUM and use it 
for configuring a voicemail account, a SIP phone or a DISA account.
There are some ideas for integrating presence into this module, but 
those are still not implemented as they have to be part of the greater 
effort of integrating IM and presence.

I've written the base module as well as the developer's documentation 
and have started working on integration of ASTUM into other modules.

* Virtual parking for virtual hosting

The current call parking function only allows one parking lot per PBX. I 
have started to implement code that allows you to set up multiple 
parking lots, one per user, company or universe in your PBX. The basic 
code is there, I just need to clean it up and add configuration parsing 
to it. Someone told me that people want to configure in configuration 
files, not in the source code :-)

* ATF: The Asterisk Testing Framework

While doing some groundwork for ASTUM and another project, I saw the 
need for a testing framework. Asterisk is a large and complex software 
that keeps changing. Sometimes a fix that solves a problem in one place 
causes another problem that the developer of the fix forgot or could not 
test. With a good testing framework for parsers and protocol decoders, 
we can avoid some of those situations. The way to do this is by 
implementing a test framework within the source code, something that 
Fredrik Thulin - the primary developer of the Open Source SIP proxy YXA 
- told me a while ago while showing his testing framework. I decided for 
once to listen to someone else and take his advice ;-)

I started off with some code before Christmas. And the power of Open 
Source clicked in. Russell saw my ideas, thought a while, and improved 
it dramatically. We're now working together on implementing the core 
framework so that other developers can use it.

The test framework will be a developer's tool, nothing for end users. 
The benefit for end users will be less bad surprises as we fix bugs in 
Asterisk.

* Chan_sip3: A new SIP channel

The current SIP channel has reached the limit of what we can do with 
that old code base. Some significant changes are needed to improve it 
even more and make it more SIP compliant, as well as implementing 
security, SIP over TCP and a lot of new functions like shared call 
appearance. I will take the lead in this, working with a number of 
developers in the community as well as Kevin and the Digium team to make 
this new SIP channel a reality. I don't expect it to be done to 1.4, but 
we should have the basic new SIP channel, with the same functionality as 
the current one, done by then.

We have have spent a lot of time discussing what is needed outside of 
chan_sip to make this happen, as well as putting together the wish list 
for the new channel. In a few week's time, I will publish a document on 
it for input by the community.

Why version 3? Well, version 1 is in the current Asterisk. chan_sip2 was 
a skunk-works project I spent time on a while ago.

* SIP transfers - improved attended transfers

Well, this is something I've been working on together with a customer 
for a while. The current patch solves the particular customer's problem, 
and the code is in production, but it is not generic enough for the 
project yet. As the customer hasn't paid for my work, I had to put the 
project on the backburner. It still needs a few weeks of work to be 
completed and will improve the SIP transfer support vastly. However, 
some things could not be solved in the current code base and will have 
to wait for chan_sip3.

* The Astricon tour of 2006

For Astricon, we're planning several Astricons this year. A series of 
smaller Astricon for beginners in Europe and the USA, as well as the 
community gathering in Europe and the large Astricon 2006 in the US. 
Astricon Europe will be in Stockholm, Sweden and Astricon 2006 during 
the early summer will be in Dallas, Texas in the fall.

---------

Well, that was the current list of projects apart from the usual bug 
fixing and patch testing. What will be completed and when depends on 
available time, feedback and support from customers.

I learn a lot by being part of the Asterisk community and meet and get 
to know a lot of new friends. Open Source is not only about software, 
it's about people.

My next event is the Asterisk Bootcamp in Kansas City, after that 
another bootcamp here in Stockholm and the Von tradeshow in California.

2006 will be a great year for us all in the community.

Happy New Year!

/Olle E. Johansson
Edvina.net