Digium just took the wraps off of an open source development effort for a new version of Asterisk call processing software that has been quietly under development for a couple of years. Dubbed Asterisk SCF (for “Scalable Communications Framework”), and positioned as an Open Source “project”, you’ll find background, narrative and the resources to download and share code at this Web site. What you see is the product of give-and-take coordinated by the head of Software Development at Digium, Kevin Fleming.

Under various code names (including “PineMango” and “Project Hydra”) Digium collected a wish list of features and functions for the next generation of distributed, fault-tolerant and “open” IP-based call processing features and functions and began generating and compiling code to provide the basis of those capabilities. The core technology is based on the Internet Communications Engine (ICE) from ZeroC.com. ICE is a freely distributed set of telephony middleware distributed according to the GNU General Public License (GPL). Therefore, it is ready-made for open source distribution and management.

For its part, Digium is stepping up to the tasks of managing a variety of resources for a developer community aimed at taking the “open source ACD” into new use cases that are global in nature and distributed, while at the same time highly reliable, secure and large-scale. Flexibility will be encouraged by the introduction of a low-level API that obviates the need for either the Asterisk Gateway Interface (AGI) and the Asterisk Management Interface (AMI), each of which evolved “in front of” the original Asterisk code base to paper over some of the deficiencies of the original Asterisk code as it sought to support multiple application instances and handling real-time interactions and transactions.

Use of a low level API enables a broader set of developers, using the programming languages of their choice to build new applications and upload them to “the cloud” where they can be invoked and executed by others. It amounts to a much more capacious and feature-laden way to deploy new communications-enabled applications. At least that’s where things are heading. The evergreen issues, such as general security and the protection of data pumping through the signaling layer, are being sorted out. In the mean time, the system is architected to support “100% test coverage”, which is already an improvement over deployments of standard Asterisk implementations.

Here’s a link to the press release announcing the Asterisk SCF Project. In it Digium spokespeople note that this is definitely not a replacement for the existing Asterisk product (which is in release 1.8 at this time). But it encourages “early adopters” to visit the Asterisk SCF Project Web site to register, download the software and stay abreast of the latest developments.

Categories: Articles

Tags: VoIP, IP-based telephony, Recombinant Communications, Asterisk, Digium