Book Image

FreeSWITCH 1.2 - Second Edition

Book Image

FreeSWITCH 1.2 - Second Edition

Overview of this book

FreeSWITCH is an open source telephony platform designed to facilitate the creation of voice and chat-driven products, scaling from a soft-phone to a PBX and even up to an enterprise-class soft-switch. It is always exciting to design and build your own telephony system to suit your needs, but the task is time-consuming and involves a lot of technical skill."FreeSWITCH 1.2" comes to your rescue to help you set up a telephony system quickly and securely using FreeSWITCH. It is rich with practical examples and will give you all of the information and skills needed to implement your own PBX system.You will start with a detailed description of the FreeSWITCH system architecture. Thereafter you will receive step-by-step instructions on how to set up basic and advanced features for your telephony platform.The book begins by introducing the architecture and workings of FreeSWITCH before detailing how to plan a telephone system and then moves on to the installation, configuration, and management of a feature-packed PBX. You will learn about maintaining a user directory, XML dial plan, and advanced dial plan concepts, call routing, and the extremely powerful Event Socket. You will finally learn about the online community and history of FreeSWITCH."FreeSWITCH 1.2" is an indispensable tool for novice and expert alike.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
FreeSWITCH 1.2
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

General overview


The event system is the nerve center of FreeSWITCH, allowing both internal and external software to subscribe to a stream of activity happening inside the switching system. In FreeSWITCH, almost everything that happens generates (or "fires") an event. Receiving a new phone call results in an event. Ending a call results in an event. Committing a log entry to disk results in an event. Even speaking or going silent can generate an event. Each event becomes part of an event stream, which is tagged with an event type, event category , and various other details about the event. Other pieces of software can then listen for these events and act on them in any way they wish, such as streaming them to you via a TCP socket connection in plain text.

Events provide yet another way to extend functionality within FreeSWITCH. Events are different from hooks or modules (which can affect the actual processing and handling of calls in real time). Events provide an asynchronous (or non-blocking...