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

[Gordon Henderson]

On Wed, 11 Feb 2009, Tilghman Lesher wrote:

> On Wednesday 11 February 2009 13:07:16 Gordon Henderson wrote:
>>
>> In my world, they go to the web interface, create the extension, tick a
>> selection of existing extensions and the code then writes out a new
>> segment of dialplan to create the new extension, issues an extensions
>> reload command to asterisk and off it goes... The dialplan was static
>> before, and is static after, it's just that I wrote some php to write
>> dialplan based on user input...
>>
>> How do others do it?
>
> I'd have a range of extensions, when dialled, it goes to the database,
> retrieves the list of channels, and dials those channels.  The web frontend
> would look exactly the same, but the data would go directly into a database,
> not taking an extra step to go into a dialplan, then reload the text file.
> The advantage is that I'd never have the possibility of two people colliding
> on the regeneration of a text file.  While it is possible for two people to
> select the same number when defining new extensions, that can be very
> easily worked around, given that database updates are atomic.

Intersting, but I have no database. (well, not in the sense of a 
relational or SQL based one) I build systems that boot off flash and run 
them from RAM. Configuration is stored back on flash, but not using a 
relational database. Thats just too heavy IMO for embedded systems, and 
storing data in flat-files is just as efficient, if not more-so for a few 
100 entries.

The other issues, locking, etc. these are all classic computer science 
problems which have been long-solved so shouldn't really be an issue (and 
my background is real-time control, robotics, parallel processing, etc. so 
from my point of view nothing more than an academic excercise)

Cheers,

Gordon

(Off to dine with some philosophers now and travel round Exeter, selling 
my wares before going to book an airline ticket ;-)