Asterisk VoIP News

Friday, January 13, 2006

Announce: AEL2 -- The Future --

Call to Action!

For those who have the courage/ability, go grab an SVN copy of the asterisk release, the HEAD version,

and my latest patch, from: http://bugs.digium.com/view.php?id=6021

Right now, the latest version of the patch is 0.10.

apply it to the SVN head version, and do a "make".

Read the Wiki on AEL2: http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+AEL2

Look at the examples at:
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/AEL+Example+Snippets

Then, sit down and rewrite your extension.conf to /etc/asterisk/extensions.ael2

Use "utils/aelparse -n" to check your file. Get rid of all the syntax errors. Repeat until clean.

Then, see if your extensions.ael2 loads. Remove all the contexts except [general] from your extensions.conf, and restart asterisk. Test the new dialplan.

Now, at this point, you have some information that would be useful to me! I need to know your trials, troubles, confusions, and solutions. Perhaps there's some added check that AEL2 could make that might have warned or helped you. Perhaps you'll help find some bug and solify AEL2.

WHY ON EARTH WOULD I WANT TO DO ALL THAT WORK?, you might ask!

In answer to that, my reply is the Parable of the Programmer:
******
In the beginning, there was machine code, and the Programmer thought it was great.

Then, along came the assembler, and the programmer found it very useful.

Then, along came the macro assembler, and the programmer was excited indeed.

But then came the "programming language", and the programmer left behind the "macro assembler", and never went back to it.
******
Now, the goal is for the same to happen to you, in moving from the extensions.conf method of programming dialplans to extensions.ael2.

If you don't think it will improve the quality of the code you write for dialplans, or reduce your costs of dialplan development, then we'll scrap the project and hand ourselves over to public humiliation. ;^)

murf