Friends in the Asterisk community! HAPPY NEW YEAR! (You have to emulate Allison saying that yourself, or try to copy me saying it with my Swedish accent!) 2005 was a great year for Asterisk. After more than a year's work, we released Asterisk 1.2 with lots of new functionality. We had two succesful community gatherings - Astricon Europe in June and Astricon 2005 in October. A number of books on Asterisk was published, one as a free downloadable book. The number of Asterisk-related projects and products grew exponentially. The user base grew like crazy. It's amazing to be part of this, seeing it grow. For 2006, we are planning two new releases. The first, Asterisk 1.4, is planned for the summer. As always, the changes and new features depends on the developers, their own needs or what their customers pay for. There are quite a lot of ideas floating around and it is very hard to say what will be done and implemented for the next release. That's the beauty and the problem of Open Source - the lack of a product marketing department than can decide the shape of a new version of the product. The users are pretty much in control. I wanted to share some of my thoughts for the beginning of the year, telling you more about some projects I am working on. Remember though, I am just one of the growing number of Asterisk developers, and there are much development and brainstorming going on in the team. The new developer blogs that is coming up on asterisk.org will keep you up to date on all of us in the development team are up to. Asterisk.org will continue to improve and be a better tool for communication within the community. * ASTUM: The Asterisk User Management module A project I have been working on for a few months and that hopefully will be part of 1.4 is the ASTUM module. It's a module that focuses on the user, an individual that has one or several phones attached to Asterisk. Today, the user exists in too many places in the configuration, as well as properties belonging to that person. With AUM, you configure username, password, pin code, e-mail address and related properties once, then refer to it in the other configuration files by a user ID. Those modules will fetch the information from ASTUM and use it for configuring a voicemail account, a SIP phone or a DISA account. There are some ideas for integrating presence into this module, but those are still not implemented as they have to be part of the greater effort of integrating IM and presence. I've written the base module as well as the developer's documentation and have started working on integration of ASTUM into other modules. * Virtual parking for virtual hosting The current call parking function only allows one parking lot per PBX. I have started to implement code that allows you to set up multiple parking lots, one per user, company or universe in your PBX. The basic code is there, I just need to clean it up and add configuration parsing to it. Someone told me that people want to configure in configuration files, not in the source code :-) * ATF: The Asterisk Testing Framework While doing some groundwork for ASTUM and another project, I saw the need for a testing framework. Asterisk is a large and complex software that keeps changing. Sometimes a fix that solves a problem in one place causes another problem that the developer of the fix forgot or could not test. With a good testing framework for parsers and protocol decoders, we can avoid some of those situations. The way to do this is by implementing a test framework within the source code, something that Fredrik Thulin - the primary developer of the Open Source SIP proxy YXA - told me a while ago while showing his testing framework. I decided for once to listen to someone else and take his advice ;-) I started off with some code before Christmas. And the power of Open Source clicked in. Russell saw my ideas, thought a while, and improved it dramatically. We're now working together on implementing the core framework so that other developers can use it. The test framework will be a developer's tool, nothing for end users. The benefit for end users will be less bad surprises as we fix bugs in Asterisk. * Chan_sip3: A new SIP channel The current SIP channel has reached the limit of what we can do with that old code base. Some significant changes are needed to improve it even more and make it more SIP compliant, as well as implementing security, SIP over TCP and a lot of new functions like shared call appearance. I will take the lead in this, working with a number of developers in the community as well as Kevin and the Digium team to make this new SIP channel a reality. I don't expect it to be done to 1.4, but we should have the basic new SIP channel, with the same functionality as the current one, done by then. We have have spent a lot of time discussing what is needed outside of chan_sip to make this happen, as well as putting together the wish list for the new channel. In a few week's time, I will publish a document on it for input by the community. Why version 3? Well, version 1 is in the current Asterisk. chan_sip2 was a skunk-works project I spent time on a while ago. * SIP transfers - improved attended transfers Well, this is something I've been working on together with a customer for a while. The current patch solves the particular customer's problem, and the code is in production, but it is not generic enough for the project yet. As the customer hasn't paid for my work, I had to put the project on the backburner. It still needs a few weeks of work to be completed and will improve the SIP transfer support vastly. However, some things could not be solved in the current code base and will have to wait for chan_sip3. * The Astricon tour of 2006 For Astricon, we're planning several Astricons this year. A series of smaller Astricon for beginners in Europe and the USA, as well as the community gathering in Europe and the large Astricon 2006 in the US. Astricon Europe will be in Stockholm, Sweden and Astricon 2006 during the early summer will be in Dallas, Texas in the fall. --------- Well, that was the current list of projects apart from the usual bug fixing and patch testing. What will be completed and when depends on available time, feedback and support from customers. I learn a lot by being part of the Asterisk community and meet and get to know a lot of new friends. Open Source is not only about software, it's about people. My next event is the Asterisk Bootcamp in Kansas City, after that another bootcamp here in Stockholm and the Von tradeshow in California. 2006 will be a great year for us all in the community. Happy New Year! /Olle E. Johansson Edvina.net