VoIP-Forum

It\’s not easy to merge a VoIP network and the PSTN network. Recently, I\’ve been looking into how Asterisk handles phone numbers, SIP uri:s and Caller ID names. SIP is based on UTF-8, so it\’s very transparent in how it handles names with non-US character sets. Asterisk happily takes a Caller ID Name, the From: name from SIP utf-8 and stuffs it into the Caller ID Name field, which seems to be ASCII. In Asterisk we have not-so-well-defined \”extensions\” that are alphanumeric in a way, but in a lot of cases expects a phone number only. It will strip off \”un-necessary\” characters, like \”()-.\”. Of course, a SIP address being \”firstname.lastname\” will be changed by these routines. In phone numbers, stripping these characters does not change the phone number. In SIP, it changes the address to something that is a different address. Just one example of many that needs to be fixed.We need to come up with a way to handle this properly and always be aware of the character set, character set encoding and be able to convert from one to another without loosing the ability to place calls and return calls.And it does not surprise me a bit that even in the 21st century, I still have to work with character set handling problems, conversions between character sets and teaching us/english programmers about the need to use national characters like our Swedish \”åäö\”.

During the developer\’s conference call yesterday evening,it was decided that we finally should release the much-awaitedAsterisk 2.0 Stable release, also called \”codename AAFJ\”.This relaese is based on the \”hidden\” cvs that has been inoperation for six months by a group of core development membersin the Asterisk.org open source project, under the leadership ofBrian K. East, who will maintain the stable code base forthe 2.0 CVS tree and releases. (more…)

Introducing The Asterisk Realtime Architecture - ARA

The Asterisk Realtime Architecture is a new set of drivers andfunctions implemented in Asterisk 1.1dev (and the following v1.2 stable).The benefits of this architecture are many, both from a code managementstandpoint and from an installation perspective. This article introduces you to the ARA. 

The ARA is designed to be independent of storage. Currently, mostdrivers are based on SQL, but the architecture should be able to handleother storage methods in the future, like LDAP.efit comes in the database support. In Asterisk v1.0 somefunctions supported MySQL database, some PostgreSQL and other ODBC.With the ARA, we have a unified database interface internally in Asterisk,so if one function supports database integration, all databases that has arealtime driver will be supported in that function. (more…)