[Asterisk-Users] AEL Status

[Steve Murphy]

Hello--

It's been a while since I wrote any updates about AEL/AEL2 to the users
list, and I thought it might be worthwhile to update everyone on what is
going on in respects to AEL.

What the heck is AEL? The Asterisk Extension Language. A higher level
language for extensions.conf, which will appear in the config file,
extensions.ael, in the /etc/asterisk/ (or equiv) directory. It provides
some handy control structures, like if/else and switch statements, etc.

To all those who have experimented with AEL and AEL2, many thanks for
your feedback.

I authored a rewrite of AEL called AEL2. About a month or so ago, AEL2
replaced AEL in the trunk version of the asterisk source. 

The asterisk wiki page for AEL2 explains this also, and I've kept it up
to date.

AEL2 should be fully upward compatible with AEL; it should accept any
AEL code you wrote previously without complaint, unless, of course,
there were problems with your code! 

Recently, some bugs were found and fixed in the code generator for
switches contained in switches, and an ehancement for callerID matching
in the name of the extension was added. 

The goal is to make sure that AEL is a step forward for users, not a
step backward; all the nifty dialplan features provided by
extensions.conf should be accessible via extensions.ael. The wiki page
has a list of all the differences with the original AEL.

Probably the biggest gripe users had against AEL was the lack of the
ability to include other files from extensions.ael. This capability is
provided by the #include "filename" statement, which can virtually be
included almost anywhere in extensions.ael, including inside contexts
and extensions,  and included files can include other files, up to 50
levels deep.

So, in closing, allow me to put in a plug for AEL: 

Please, try it!!! 

You can either recode your extensions.conf into extensions.ael, or you
can use both, and add new contexts and extensions to the .ael file.

If you find some nifty feature of extensions.conf that is a showstopper
by being absent in extensions.ael, let me know, it may be possible to
provide it in AEL.

And, I won't even mention that AEL is the **Future**, or that you "Can't
fight the Future", "Resistance is Futile", or any of that kind of
marketing hype! ;^)

murf