[asterisk-users] What web GUI are people happy with?

[shadowym]

I agree that a GUI can never be as flexible and efficient as raw script.
That is not my point.  My point is that the more complex things get the more
an abstraction layer of some sort makes sense.  It's the same reason people
use C code instead of doing everything in assembly language.  Not as
efficient but much less work.
 
I fail to see how anyone can write all configuration scripts for even a
relatively simple dialplan for an Asterisk server in 3 minutes!  You must be
talking about using templates yes?
 
From: David Gomillion [mailto:david.gomillion at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2007 9:37 AM
To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
Subject: Re: [asterisk-users] What web GUI are people happy with?
 
On 10/16/07, shadowym <shadowym at hotmail.com> wrote:
I don't do text editing so please indulge me.  Why would someone want to do
that when a GUI makes life so much easier?

On a practical note, If someone was deploying 2 or 3 of these a week, most
of which have 5-10+ extensions doing all kinds of fancy things like call 
queues, parking, forwarding, followme, voicemail to email etc. etc. how
practical is it to type all this in by hand making sure to get ever single
space, ".", ",", "{}", "[]" etc. exactly right which NEVER happens.  So then

you have to spend more time debugging the conf files.

Even with a bunch of pre-made templates it seems like an awful lot of
unnecessary heavy lifting when a GUI can make it so much easier and
efficient.


You're welcome to do it however you like. But please don't suggest that
using a GUI will make things more efficient. Someone with experience
scripting can easily write a system to generate a well-formed, valid .conf
file, with appropriate comments. I, for one, have done this. 

The reason many seasoned Asterisk admins prefer using the .conf files
instead of using a GUI is that no GUI can possibly conceive of every way to
do something. So, at some point, if your PBX does anything interesting,
you're going to have to integrate your changes with what the GUI generated.
And not let the GUI stomp on the changes. But make sure everything will be
in contexts that can access what it should, and not access what it
shouldn't. 

Now, as far as how practical it is to create the dialplan by hand, I can
tell you that it only takes about 2-3 minutes to full configure such a
simple PBX as you described. Most GUI systems take far longer than that to
install, much less configure. Also, I can more easily manage systems
remotely via SSH than through many of the GUIs out there. 

So, as I said before, do whatever works best for you. But please don't
insinuate that editing configuration files cannot be a good idea.
 
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