[asterisk-users] What do you use? .conf or AEL?

[Gordon Henderson]

On Wed, 11 Feb 2009, Philipp Kempgen wrote:

> Gordon Henderson schrieb:
>> On Wed, 11 Feb 2009, Alan Lord (News) wrote:
>>
>>> That was quite an interesting set of responses. I didn't get any
>>> impression that there is a strong preference either way.
>>
>> I asked the same question some time back too... Got a few replies, and now
>> (as then), all my systems are 100% .conf (or dialplan code, whatever you
>> want to call it)
>>
>> John Lees reply did rather irriate me - because he gave no explanation, or
>> justification for it - hence my own terse reply!
>>
>> I have some huge dialplans with 1000's of lines of code in them, but most
>> of it is actually computer generated - as I said in a post some time back:
>> "PHP is my AEL"... I'll code something by hand, then get PHP to generate
>> multiple instances of it, rewriting my extensions.conf file every time.
>>
>> I haven't yet had to resort to AEL or AGI and personally I'm all for
>> keeping the "core" as simple as possible - less code to go wrong and all
>> that.
>>
>> This to me seems OK to me, as once a system is installed, the changes to
>> it are infrequent, and a reload takes a fraction of a second.
>
> So what's so irritating about AEL then? You are using a higher
> level language to generate extensions.conf as well.

I didn't say anything was irritating about AEL. I said I was irritated by 
John Lee's terse reply which I quote: "Of course you should be using AEL" 
which he gave with no justification at all.

My view is that you should use what you need to use for your application.

For my appication, I get on OK with pure "dialplan". I have a fully 
featured PBX system which runs on nothing more than dialplan, and I'm 
happy with it. I do have something "higher level" that generates some of 
the dialplan for me, but I still had to write that dialplan in the first 
place and I was happy to do it in pure "dialplan".

Gordon