Page 260 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

Figure 10-1. The Flash Operator Panel management interface
A New Approach to Dialplans

Asterisk has matured both in technological innovation and in popularity, but as one
becomes more and more immersed in this wonderful world, one cannot help but bump
into limitations. When you handle a lot of complex, enterprise-grade scripting with
Asterisk alone, you will face many obstacles using dialplan logic. As flexible and pow-
erful as the dialplan is, as a programming language it is quite odd, and much less flexible
than most modern scripting languages. When one needs to provide advanced logic, the
dialplan, the GUI, and even the more advanced AEL can become very frustrating.

As you build more and more complexity into your dialplans, some of the following may
cause you some head-scratching:
• Conditional looping and branching
• Variables
• Complex data structures
• Database/LDAP integration
• Use of third-party libraries
• Exchanging and distributing VoIP functionality
• Extending the configuration languages
• Poor error handling
• Poor date and time handling

§ We would like to thank Jay Phillips for contributing the ideas and code for this section of the book.

232 | Chapter 10: Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) and Adhearsion