[Freeswitch-users] Conference Questions

[Alfredo Quiroga-Villamil]

Hello:

I've been using asterisk for a little bit over three years now. A
couple of months ago I found out about freeswitch, took a look at it,
thought it was interesting and moved on. A few weeks ago, I started
looking at a project I've been wanting to work on for quite a while
using conferences and started exploring systems and different
approaches. Based on the requirements I have, I decided to use
freeswitch. It seemed like it had the best support for conferencing so
I went for it. According to some documentation I found it also seems
to allow for more concurrent calls than asterisk which is an added
bonus.

I got a server ready, installed FC8 on it which is what I have in
production now, unpacked freeswitch there and so far it's running
beautifully. Very painless process really to get it installed, I was
happy to see that. Configuration seems a bit different since it's XML;
but being a developer myself I can see many advantages to having done
that in the future as the system scales and grows in complexity.

Sorry for the long introduction, getting to my question now. So ...
What I want to be able to do is the following:

Create and control conferences via the HTTP API. I've been reading a
bit for the past two days the documentation and I am becoming more
familiar now with how things are done using ESL, the support for PHP,
perl and I believe others.

a) It seemed to me like the way to setup the moderator of the
conference is by setting a parameter in the DialPlan and specifying
based on a condition who the moderator is, say for instance the
destination number. That's fine and it makes sense, however, say that
I am creating a new conference and I want to have 3 participants where
one of them is the moderator. What would I have to do to specify that
person A dialing for example number xxx-xxx-xxxx is the moderator (via
HTTP)? Would I have to create my own call to the system and add say an
entry to DialPlan with the right parameter for the moderator, then
create the conference?

b) When a conference is created, or when I go to create a new
conference via HTTP using the API, does it allow for example for all
numbers that will be added to be dialed at once? Or should the process
be dial each participant, sending say 3 http requests via the API? The
API command "conference dial" seems to only take one argument for
destination number; but I am asking just in case I missed something.

Thanks in advance for the help and I apologize for the long email.

Alfredo