Jim Van Meggelen’s Blog

It seems that recently a lot of open source projects have emerged with excellent pedigree. In a nutshell, Mighty Asterisk has got some competition.

FreeSwitch has recently released their first non-beta version (which is already 1.0.1), and their community is exploding. FreeSwitch has performance capabilities that are very impressive, and if you are a developer of complex or carrier-grade voice applications, you owe it to yourself to give FreeSwitch a careful look.

YATE has been around for almost 5 years, and is well-regarded for it’s rock-solid stability. It has fantastic performance capabilities as well, and is solidly carrier-grade. The YATE community is a bit lean, and the documentation is a bit too light, but this powerful engine should not be ignored.

sipXecs evolved out of Pingtel, who recognized the importance of open source telecom and started SIPFoundry. These folks are serious about SIP, and cannot be ignored. Many of the SIPFoundry folks contribute to the IETF SIP standard, so they are well-respected by the community. Recently, Nortel has created a product that uses this technology, which demonstrates the professionalism and technical accomplishment of this product. Also, Amazon uses this for their PBX, so you know it scales and is reliable.

Open source telecom has grown up, and it’s going to be exciting to see how these projects mature and evolve. One thing is certain, all this innovation in the open source telecom space is certain to benefit both solution providers, and–more importantly–customers.

As someone who only knows one programming language (REXX), I was always paralyzed by trying to figure out what one to learn next. Perl, PHP, Ruby, Python; I’ve tried them all, and while I basically get what’s going on, I find that the time required to actually do anything useful is simply more than I’m willing to invest.

Freeswitch has been a project that has interested me since the day it was started, but I always figured it’d be a tough thing to get into, simply because it is geared towards people with a developer bent, (and I don’t see them writing a REXX module any time soon

But then along comes Lua. Hey! This looks kinda like REXX. I have started playing around with it, and it looks like I can actually get it to do useful things very quickly. FreeSwitch has a Lua interpreter built right in.

This means that I can grab a copy of FreeSwitch, and start playing with simple application development right out of the gate!

I’ll be playing . . .