On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 6:52 PM, Matthew Lockwood <matthew.lockwood@gmail.com> wrote:
That would involve me learning a totally new framework. It'll not the hardest code I'll ever write by far, so I'm okay coding it up on my own. However, I definitely need a lot of help from fabulous designers to actually make the interface pretty and useable. Plus, I'm only one person and will need a lot of feedback to create something that rocks - everybody has a different use case and I can't foresee how everybody will use it, so that kind of feedback will go into re-engineering it.

If you guys are serious about this then I would like to make a few suggestions that might be obvious but for the sake of the project we'll make them explicitly obvious.

First, before deciding what framework to use, it would be good to hold some discussions about what the GUI actually needs to do:
What are the design goals?
Will it be just for setting up extensions and the dialplan? Or will it go much farther than that?
Will you be using mod_xml_curl for everything? If so, what database(s) will you support?
Are you going to have extra goodies like an IVR builder?
A 'visual voicemail' page?
A user portal?
Management interface to 'spy' on users?
A CDR/call accounting system?
FIFO and/or ACD queue management?
MOH and sound files management?

It's okay to start small and build your way out, but you need to know before you start building what the grand scheme will be. The larger the goals of the project, the narrower your choices for a framework that can do it all. The simple fact of the matter is that if you want to use a MVC web framework then you have a somewhat limited number of choices. You need a MVC WF that fits your needs, which means it needs to be at least somewhat flexible. If you want a pretty GUI then you need to decide if you want a rich Internet application (RIA) front end like AIR, or do you want something along the lines of XHTML/CSS/JS and use a platform like Dojo which gives you cross-browser widgets and tools. All of this on top of the fact that if you want volunteers to assist you will need to pick something that people either know or can learn quickly.

Oh, and be prepared for people to give you unsolicited opinions about all sorts of things. :)

All that being said, I say go for it. Find what works for you and see what happens. Be sure to use #freeswitch-gui. If this really takes off I'm sure that we could even start a mailing list for GUI development.

Enjoy!
-MC