[asterisk-users] What's up with the Manager Interface?!?!

[Matt Florell]

On 11/29/06, Douglas Garstang <dgarstang at oneeighty.com> wrote:
> The Asterisk Manager Interface is driving me nuts.
> Whoever wrote it should be drawn and quartered.

You would need a ton of rope and a few hundred horses for that :)

The Manager API code is distributed across dozens of source files in
the Asterisk code base and if you include every possible input and
output of it you are talking about code contributions from over a
hundred people(including me).

The problem is that the Manager API is not centrally coded and has
evolved over the last 5 years to accommodate a lot of functionality
that it was never designed to do. In my experience, the Manager API is
more stable in 1.2 than it was in 1.0, and it was more stable in 1.0
than it was in the pre 1.0 CVS codebase.

Having developed a Manager Queue system 3 years ago, I fought a lot of
the Manage API battles and eventually got to a fairly robust and
non-blocking system that deals a lot of the flaws of the Manager API,
but it was by no means a full-featured solution that worked with every
kind of Manager input or output.

My recommendation to people starting out with Manager API programming
is to either specialize it as much as you can to the tasks you need to
do with it, or use something like the AstManProxy to handle the
connection and interface mess.

MATT---