[asterisk-users] Looking for starting point?

[Lee Jenkins]

Gary H. Thompson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Most of my experience in this field have been with 
> Borland products, specifically Delphi. I also have been involved with 
> database programming, same platform as the communications.

I can't tell you anything more helpful than Michael has.  I purchased a 
tomb called "Fedora 5 and Red Hat Enterprise Bible" form Wiley press, 
which has been very helpful.

Also I would suggest purchasing or downloading "Asterisk The Future of 
Telephony".  See the Asterisk Doc project:

http://www.asteriskdocs.org

I personally like a paper book to have around.

I am a Delphi man myself.  As you become more familiar with and 
comfortable with Asterisk, you'll inevitably want to customize 
Asterisk's behavior through one of the interfaces available.

One of the most common is the AGI interface which allows Asterisk to 
communicate with external programs through standard input and standard 
output (ie: Writeln(), Readln()).  You can call these external programs 
directly from the dialplan and most people seem to prefer PHP, bash or 
other integrated scripting.

Being a Delphi programmer as well, I wanted to let you know that I have 
had great success in using open source FreePascal and Lazarus IDE for 
developing linux based executables for the AGI interface which are 
basically just console type programs.  I personally prefer using 
binaries because I think they execute faster than interpreted languages.

I wrote a Cepstral Text to Speech wrapper using those tools not too long 
ago.  Info and source is available on the wiki:

http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/DTSwift+Cepstral+AGI+Wrapper

When you're at the point where you want to start writing AGI and you if 
you decide to try freepascal/lazarus, that may help you get an idea of 
writing an AGI using FP/Laz.

Welcome to the community.

-- 

Warm Regards,

Lee