Asterisk VoIP News

Friday, March 31, 2006

Connect GoogleTalk to your Telephone with FreeSwitch

The FreeSwitch project announces the immediate availability of a brand new Open Source Jingle XMPP signaling library as well as an endpoint module enabling a Jingle telephony gateway. The library dubbed "libDingaLing", written in C, creates a layer of abstraction to allow for an easier transition as the Jingle protocol evolves and eliminates the need to deal with XMPP or XML and supports many concurrent instances within 1 application.

The library is currently considered to be in Alpha stage, has been compiled and tested on many computer platforms including Windows XP, Solaris, Linux and MacOS X. The only other existing implementation of this protocol released thus far is the GoogleTalk instant messenger application therefore the library has been designed with interoperability with this particular client in mind but also anticipates changes in the protocol to come along as it becomes more widely accepted.

The new endpoint module appropriately named "mod_dingaling" couples FreeSWITCH to libDingaLing and allows both inbound and outbound communication. With this technology, GoogleTalk calls can gateway to the PSTN or to other VoIP protocols such as SIP or H323.

FreeSWITCH, http://www.freeswitch.org is a new open source telephony project started in early 2006 designed to provide a modular platform on which to merge various technologies. Both libDingaLing and FreeSWITCH were written by Anthony Minessale II, a developer who after contributing to other telephony related open source projects, decided to start a new initiative that focuses on abstraction, modularity and cross-platform crossarchitectural design.