[asterisk-users] Recent additions to the Digium Asterisk development team

[BJ Weschke]

On 8/18/06, Barzilai <barcho at creacion.com.uy> wrote:
> Jean-Michel Hiver wrote:
> > Which makes me think, what is the real use of AEL. I have taken a look
> > at it, and it makes asterisk's config file almost as unreadable as SER.
> >
> > What exactly does AEL do that a well written AGI / FastAGI app doesn't?
> >
> > I would think (but I'm surely wrong) that it would be better to do
> > work on  having well defined APIs that allow us to script Asterisk
> > (such as AGI and the Manager interface) rather than invent Yet Another
> > Pseudo Programming Language - which is going to be an endless task...
> > Don't you think?
>
> First, congratulations to the new members.
>
> In my case, the promising existence of AEL2 is what made me decide that
> I could use Asterisk to do what I needed (very complex IVR's + Call
> Center with dozens of services answered by many agents) and not having
> to do it in a spaghetti extensions.conf measuring 5000 lines of nonsense.
>
> And now that you mention "well defined API", a good way to have a
> manageable one is to have a "good architecture", which Asterisk has not.
> I understand this is for historical reasons because Asterisk has grown
> fast and without order, but having Dial, Answer, MYSQL, AGI, Set, and
> VoiceMail (!!!!!!!!!!!) at the same architectural level IS NOT a good
> architecture... if I want a monolith I'll watch "2001: A Space Odyssey".
>
> At the moment Asterisk is still a very useful system, but if people keep
> throwing new stuff at it because "I want to have this cool feature from
> the dialplan so I created app_XyZ"... how long will it be before it
> crumbles down from its own weight?
>
> So, yes, a scripting language (AEL or something better) is very useful,
> and it should rely on a good API which should rely on a good
> architecture.  [Fast]AGI and the Manager API, each  give partial solutions.
>
> I also want to add that I saw a great improvement from versions 1.0.x to
> versions 1.2.x. Let's see what 1.4 will bring, but  I hope a 2.0 version
> with a complete rearchitecturing could finally make Asterisk "the Apache
> of telephony" as I read somewhere.  (Or wait for the OpenPBX guys to
> awake from their coma).
>
> Enough caffeine for tonight.
>

 Asterisk is what you make of it. If you don't want certain
applications to run on a certain instance/machine then you should
"noload" them in modules.conf.


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Bird's The Word Technologies, Inc.
http://www.btwtech.com/