[Freeswitch-dev] Announcing the Jester Mail project

[Chad Phillips -- Apartment Lines]

With funding and support from Star2Star Communications, and in conjunction with FreeSWITCH Solutions, I will soon be embarking on a project to bring a drop-in replacement for Asterisk's Comedian Mail to the FreeSWITCH platform.

As I learned in my own move from Asterisk to FreeSWITCH, one of the bigger challenges was finding a transparent way to transition my user's voicemail experience.  Since FreeSWITCH's native voicemail module did not adequately meet this need, I elected to write my own voicemail system, leveraging Lua -- the recommended scripting language for integrating complex tasks into the dialplan.

The underlying concept in Jester Mail is to provide a flexible, extensible, and easily customizable voicemail plugin for FreeSWITCH.  Unlike mod_voicemail, the code/configuration will be written in either XML or Lua, so that it will be easily hackable should the need arise.  Every effort will be made to make the components modular and configurable, to avoid the need to rewrite any of the core functionality.

Initial alpha releases will be based on my existing company's code, adding more and more of the standard Comedian Mail features, culminating in the 1.0 release, which will be a complete drop in replacement for Comedian Mail.  Future releases may extend functionality even beyond that provided in Comedian Mail -- we'll see about that when we get there.  :)

We'd like to encourage people to offer feedback and insight on the project as it progresses, and we'll do our best (as it fits into our budget, timeline, and larger goals) to incorporate this into our final product in a way that is most beneficial for all in the community.

Within the next 2-3 weeks, I'll be posting a strategy/architecture battle plan on the FreeSWITCH wiki.  A few weeks after that I'll commit the initial pre-alpha code to the contributions repository for community feedback.

There should be two nice side effects of this project:

  a) More people should be willing to make the transition from Asterisk to FreeSWITCH, as this removes another significant barrier for some.

  b) We will have excellent new resource to point people to for learning how to leverage Lua in FreeSWITCH.


Chad Phillips aka hunmonk