[Freeswitch-users] FreeSwitch the Right Tool?

Mon Dec 3 08:26:50 PST 2007

Sir,

I am not sure I understand your comment about my announcement
of the additional features being "cavalier" My understanding 
of the term, which I double checked at webster.com, is that you are suggesting that I am dismissing an important matter or have some
sort of snobbish attitude.  Quite frankly, I had decided against 
adding any new features before the release and then I decided that
I must stick with my original plan which was to create a voicemail
module as an exercise to ensure all the components were in place 
for a production system.  I appreciate your feedback and comments but
the cavalier remark is hard to get over.....

To answer your other questions that I did not find offensive:

The reason we use external tools is because computer programing
is complicated and takes many thousands of hours to get right.
Many of the packages we rely on have their own independent  mission
to provide the functionality in question and it's naive and against
the nature of open source to bypass these tools in favor of a home
grown solution.  The main application code of FreeSWITCH contains
nearly 130,000 lines of code by itself and that is without counting
any of the dependency libraries. A prime example is SIP, the Sofia
project works day and night for years on nothing but SIP.  SIP is 
just 1 aspect of our application and we could never match the 
functionality of their sip stack on our own with all the other things
we have to also focus on.  Our mod_sofia is about 8,000 lines of
code on top of that existing sofia stack!

The reason there are so many options is because of human kind.
Due to interoperability, innovation and general bright ideas brought
forth by our human race, we are forced to be flexible because one
man's feature is another man's bug and we must allow the 2 men to 
co-exist by giving them opposing configurations.

In terms of general usability, You will find, if you investigate
closer, that the important behavior is centralized and what you 
may be interpreting as "many ways" to do things is simply the method
of "using" these central behaviors akin to  a "skin" on a gui application.  Regardless of using an embedded language, a socket 
connection or a simple dialplan, every case results in the same 
core application code doing the actual work which is intentionally
designed in a pyramid of complexity with the top layer being the
smallest and simplest. 

To summarize,  This is a very complicated application and it
takes a lot of comprehension of telephony and multimedia to fully
understand how it works.  Even having the experience, one will
have to investigate the software first hand to fully understand how
it works.  Try to remember the first time you tried photoshop!

As a policy, I make no attempts to convince anyone to use my software.
Please also consider sipX, CallWeaver, Bayonne or YATE or any other
open source telephony application that may be available to you.

Anthony Minessale II

FreeSWITCH http://www.freeswitch.org/
ClueCon http://www.cluecon.com/

AIM: anthm
MSN:anthony_minessale at hotmail.com
GTALK/JABBER/PAYPAL:anthony.minessale at gmail.com
IRC: irc.freenode.net #freeswitch

FreeSWITCH Developer Conference
sip:888 at conference.freeswitch.org
iax:guest at conference.freeswitch.org/888
googletalk:conf+888 at conference.freeswitch.org
pstn:213-799-1400

----- Original Message ----
From: Bill Binko <bill.binko at mapshine.com>
To: freeswitch-users at lists.freeswitch.org
Sent: Sunday, December 2, 2007 4:59:15 PM
Subject: [Freeswitch-users] FreeSwitch the Right Tool?

Hi everyone,

I'm looking at FreeSwitch as a platform for an area where we're
expanding our business.  I was wondering if I could get your guidance
on whether it's the Right Tool for what I need.  I realize this is
potentially a Troll, and I apologize, but this seems so far to be a
small, positive group and I thought I'd just come out and ask.

First some background.  I have several clients who want various
value-added phone services.  Basically, they want IVR systems with some
bells and whistles such as recording calls, integration with their
websites, and "follow me" services.  My company has done similar work
for clients on the GIS (mapping) side, and I have personally worked
with Asterisk as a true smart PBX solution, so we are considering
adding this to our offerings.

We have a SIP-based VOIP provider in the colocation site we use that
has attractive pricing and we have good direct connectivity to them, so
we would like to this to be a SIP-only solution (no TDM hardware,
etc.). 

As we started looking at doing this with Asterisk, we found a few
things.  First, there are some real issues getting clear calls through
Asterisk when there is no TDM hardware in place. This seems to be due
to some timing issues, and seems to be worsened by some RTC changes on
Linux 2.6.x.  I wasn't surprised that there were some issues, but we
have had a very hard time getting it to run well on a clean distro such
as CentOS without custom kernel compiles, etc.

Perhaps most concerning, we aren't seeing the kind of community support
we found (and came to rely on) in the open-source GIS space.  Posts to
the asterisk-users board get lost on the way to the list, and when they
do make it through, they get responses like "buy a Digium card just for
timing".  Well, in our 1U servers with only a PCI-Express slot, that's
going to be a trick.

So, I quite literally went to Google and searched for "Asterisk
alternative" and FreeSwitch came up all over the place.  I installed it
on our server and had it running in about an hour with only minimal
pain.  And the sound quality (so far) has been very good when just
playing recorded sounds.

Here's my concerns about it so far - let me know if they're unfounded.

1) It seems to be reliant on a huge collection of external tools.  I'm
ok with running the FreeSwitch recommended versions of all of them, but
isn't going to be a bit fragile as these tools mature separately?

2) It seems young (as a project, not the folks on it).  Things like
this post to the homepage worry me: http://www.freeswitch.org/node/103
as it looks a bit cavalier.

3) It seems to have more options and less guidance that I expected. 
This may be a first-impression thing, but there are many ways to do
everything (Dial Plan, Integration languages, etc.).  That's sometimes
good (Perl took that approach for years) and sometimes awful (the
competing opinions get in the way).

We can contribute back to this project, both with
development/debugging/etc. time and with documentation help, and right
now it feels like the right choice.  However, I thought I'd ask
for some help getting past the concerns above before we jumped in.

Thanks in advance for your time,

Bill Binko

bill.binko at mapshine.com

      ____________________________________________________________________________________
Never miss a thing.  Make Yahoo your home page. 
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