[asterisk-dev] CSTA support for asterisk... or begining this module/project

[John Todd]

At 4:09 PM -0600 1/23/06, Fernando Romo wrote:
>
>Dear developers:
>
>I start to write a CSTA (Computer Supported Telecommunications
>Applications) protocol wrapper for the API Manager.
>
>My Goal is interact with a Matra PBX and other brands supporting
>CSTA-III protocol to interact CTI and Dialer applications.
>
>Exists any effort of another developers working in this???
>
>If not, i pretend in first place make a Perl wrapper. The wrapper takes
>the API Manager Events and "Traslate" to the according CSTA Message
>format to interact with others. Then make a app or channel for Asterisk.
>
>Any ideas, help or guide are welcome.
>
>Best Regards.... Fernando "El Pop" Romo
>

Fernando -
   Others have previously said that they're going to try for CSTA 
compliance, but I think it has been a larger job than has been 
anticipated.  I would applaud such an effort, since CSTA is a decent 
(but certainly not the only) method for moving events around in a 
call center or large enterprise PBX environment.  While it may not be 
everyone's cup of tea, having the ability to attach third-party 
applications to Asterisk more easily with the CSTA interface would 
quickly help Asterisk in the "big iron" environments where it is 
currently (mostly) invisible.
   The development effort here is (mostly) one of protocol 
translation.  I don't seem to recall any CSTA events that Asterisk 
did not somehow relay via the Manager API, though my memory of that 
long day or two of document scouring has faded in the last few 
months.  I don't think this would require any significant (if any) 
changes to the core of Asterisk, but I expect such a project would 
uncover many flaws in the current Manager API data stream, or require 
minor state update requests from your daemon which don't exist 
currently.

   Search the email archives for more discussions re: CSTA.  Here are 
some links to CSTA-related things for Asterisk:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/oscsta/
http://orderlycalls.sourceforge.net/index.php

JT