[asterisk-users] Using XML for configuration management, single-source-of-truth, etc.

[Philip Prindeville]

Jared Smith wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-12-08 at 13:55 -0800, Philip Prindeville wrote:
>   
>> Going back to my original posting, I was also suggesting that the parse 
>> tree from Asterisk could be read in and then dumped out as XML, so that 
>> other software could then ingest it... using it as a common format for 
>> passing configuration from one package to another.
>>     
>
> If you're serious about wanting to do that, it wouldn't be hard to write
> a program that used the Asterisk manager interface (see the GetConfig
> action) to read the Asterisk configs and write them out in another
> format.
>
> If you were really ambitious, you could even have Asterisk get it's
> configs from XML by using the UpdateConfig AMI action, creating use of
> #exec, or by writing a realtime driver for XML.
>
> Personally, even though I'm a big fan of XML (and things like DocBook
> and XSLT, and having written hundreds of pages of documentation in XML),
> I don't see what putting the configuration in XML buys you, other than
> the ability to check the validity of the config file (assuming, of
> course, that someone writes a DTD and keeps it up to date).
>
> In a nutshell, XML is no silver bullet.
>
> -Jared Smith
>   

No, it's not (a silver bullet) -- agreed.  But a lot of other devices 
manage their configurations via XML as well, so having a common way of 
representing shared state would simplify network provisioning, which was 
the kernel of my original posting.

3 of the handset manufacturers that I use, 1 of the firewalls, and 2 of 
the video-conference engines all use XML.  And the list gets longer 
every day.

Eventually, they will start to converge on common schemas as well...

-Philip