[Asterisk-Users] Re: What about a higher level configuration language

[Benjamin on Asterisk Mailing Lists]

On Mon, 27 Sep 2004 09:54:46 +0200, Tom Ivar Helbekkmo
<tih at eunetnorge.no> wrote:
> There is the added complication that one would need a front-end
> application to generate the configuration file(s).  You do *not* want
> to force people to write that markup-intensive XML by hand.  It tends
> to raise the blood pressure to dangerous levels...  :-)

I wasn't suggesting XML as a means to *configure* Asterisk.

Instead, I was suggesting XML as a means to *store* Asterisk's
configuration data.

You'd still use an editor and configure in a particular configuration
language, or through some GUI tool.

The benefit would be to separate content from presentation, which
always makes a lot of sense.

The outcome would be that there could be multiple different
configuration languages, like Unix shells and scripting languages, all
coexisting peacefully, without Asterisk being dependent on any one of
them.

The outcoume would also be that multiple different tools could be used
for configuration in parallel, ie expert uses some pythonian scripting
language, part-time Asterisk admin uses some GUI tool, newbie uses a
wizard/assistant, yet none of these tools would step on each other's
toes.

I do realise that extensions.conf is a somewhat different animal than
the rest of the pack, however, any kind of scripting language, whether
the present one or any other is not the right tool to store the
information. Perhaps some tokenised byte code is more suitable than
XML for storage, but still, content and presentation should be
separated.

Once you have a proper base for storing the content, whether XML or
tokenised byte code doesn't really matter so much, ONLY THEN should
you go about designing different presentation, ie scripting languages.
If you don't follow this route, you will ultimately run into a legacy
mess, such as backwards compatibility constraints, being limited by
the original limited language etc.

rgds
benjk

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