Book Image

FreeSWITCH 1.0.6

Book Image

FreeSWITCH 1.0.6

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 skills.This book comes to your rescue, helping you to set up a telephony system fast and easily using FreeSWITCH. It will take you from being a novice to creating a fully-functional telephony system of your own. It is rich with practical examples and will give you all of the information and skills needed to implement your own PBX system.The book begins by introducing the architecture and working of FreeSWITCH before detailing how to plan a telephone system and moving 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.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
FreeSWITCH 1.0.6
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
Preface
The History Of FreeSWITCH
Index

Chapter 7. Building IVR Applications with Lua

In the previous chapter, we discussed the basics of building Interactive Voice Response (IVR) applications using the built-in XML IVR engine. The XML IVR engine is useful for building simple IVR applications that are relatively static in nature. FreeSWITCH has other ways of building IVR applications that are more flexible and powerful than the built-in XML IVR engine. One way is by utilizing the various scripting languages that have been integrated into FreeSWITCH. FreeSWITCH supports the following scripting languages for building voice applications:

  • JavaScript

  • Lua

  • Perl

Any of the preceding languages can be used for building IVR applications. In this chapter we will focus on using Lua, a lightweight scripting language that is designed to be embedded within other projects. (A famous example of which is World of Warcraft.)

Note

Each of the scripting languages has its own advantages and drawbacks. Lua is a good choice because it is fast, scalable, and...