[asterisk-users] Has anybody in here created their own softphones?

[Tim Panton]

On 20 Jul 2006, at 15:12, Moises Silva wrote:

> Asterisk does not have softphone interfaces. You can write a softphone
> to support some VoIP protocol supported by Asterisk, and voila, you
> can connect to Asterisk. Supported and common protocols are IAX2, SIP
> and H323. For IAX you have a library called iaxclient, so you are not
> required to make your own implementation of the protocol. If you want
> to do it with Java, there are several SIP libraries, and at least one
> IAX2 library (based in iaxclient using JNI)
>
> http://iaxclient.sourceforge.net/
>
> Regards
>
> On 7/20/06, Kevin Khanye <utmostguru at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I would really want to know the interfaces between asterisk and  
>> softphone,
>> how they plug in together.
>>
>> The insight will be hight valued
>>
>> Regards
>>
>> Kevin
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>


The literal answer to your question is that the interface between  
asterisk
and a softphone is the VOIP protocol in the softphone.
There are softphones for asterisk that support H323, SIP and IAX2
Some of the support more than one protocol.

There are a number of ways to create your own softphone

1) use an existing soft-phone that is customizable and customise it
to look and feel the way you want it to. You will probably
have to pay a license fee for this, but one of the opensource
phones might be flexible enough.

2) use an existing open source softphone, change the interface
by changing the code to do what you want and contribute
the changes back to the developers.

3) take an existing VOIP library (nokia's SIP stack looks
interesting http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/sofia-sip/index.html)
and add a user interface. (both graphical and audio)

4) take the relevant RFCs for your chosen VOIP protocol
and start from scratch in the language/environment of your choice.


I've done 4) with IAX in Java, and I can tell you that it was
quite a lot of work, but the result falls into category 1)
i.e. you can license it from us as an SDK and then
customize it in JavaScript and HTML and run it
in a web browser.

Tim Panton

www.mexuar.com