Book Image

FreeSWITCH 1.8

By : Anthony Minessale II, Giovanni Maruzzelli
Book Image

FreeSWITCH 1.8

By: Anthony Minessale II, Giovanni Maruzzelli

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. This book introduces FreeSWITCH to IT professionals who want to build their own telephony system. This book starts with a brief introduction to the latest version of FreeSWITCH. We then move on to the fundamentals and the new features added in version 1.6, showing you how to set up a basic system so you can make and receive phone calls, make calls between extensions, and utilize basic PBX functionality. Once you have a basic system in place, we’ll show you how to add more and more functionalities to it. You’ll learn to deploy the features on the system using unique techniques and tips to make it work better. Also, there are changes in the security-related components, which will affect the content in the book, so we will make that intact with the latest version. There are new support libraries introduced, such as SQLite, OpenSS, and more, which will make FreeSWITCH more efficient and add more functions to it. We’ll cover these in the new edition to make it more appealing for you.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 6. XML Dialplan

The XML Dialplan is at the heart of a FreeSWITCH installation. For many old hands of telecommunication, coming from a different background, it can be confusing, and almost intimidating. Truth is: is very simple and logical. You just need to look at it with fresh eyes.

Let's dispel myths:

  • XML is not difficult at all, it reads exactly like a plain text configuration file
  • It does not need any kind of special editor: Notepad, Vim, Emacs, Nano, anything, will do
  • It is not esoteric: it is text logically structured

In this chapter we will not even talk about XML in itself, because there is no need to.

Instead, we'll delve into the dialplan structure: depending on its characteristics, an incoming call will land to a specific "context" in dialplan. Contexts are like completely separated "jail" (in the BSD or chroot meaning of the word), they are the "virtual machines", or the "sandboxes" of dialplan. You can go multitenant using multiple contexts.

Each context contains extensions...