08 Oct 08 Project PineMango

AstriDevCon 2008

Immediately after AstriCon 2008, this year’s Asterisk developer conference was held. This is the first time for me to attend the developer’s conference. The main reason why I didn’t attend the DevCon’s till now was very simple: I didn’t do much Asterisk core development, nor was I able to fund this trip. This year, after branching out to my own way, I finally started working on Asterisk core code (mainly patching applications to support hebrew correctly) and I decided that I want to get more involved into the project code. As a means to a goal, I decided to attend the DevCon in the hope to understand better the inner workings of the Asterisk core.

I was really happy to start working with Tilghman Lesher (Corydon76) from Digium, who was nice enough to assist me in getting up with the code faster and to understand it better. As part of the DevCon, a team consisting of myself, Jay Philippes (of adhearsion fame), Josh Colp (digium), Tilghman Lesher (digium) and other guys from SwitchVox and other avid Open Sourcers, were intrusted with the task to devise a method of bettering Asterisk’s applications developer’s appeal to non-Asterisk developers.

If you had ever tried developing an application with Asterisk, you had most probably learned that your normal paradigms of development usually don’t apply to Asterisk developments. Our aim was to take the fairly high bar and lower it to that of an intermediate web developer. One of the things Adhearsion had done well was to lower the bar on Asterisk developers for Ruby developers, making a “Ruby on Rails” paradigm environment for Asterisk.

The following image was drawn on a white-board during the DevCon, illustrating the solution:

Ok, I know the details on the image aren’t that clear, so I’ll add a better diagram of what it says:

The framework got the code name: Pinemango, after oej had commented that the codename “Pineapple” was already taken. As a tribute to Pineapple and most of the guys likeness to Mango, the project code the code name “Pinemango”.

Shortly after the DevCon, Brian Degenhardt from SwitchVox had released a highly descriptive description of the project, with a slightly modified diagram, removing the Authorization layer from the diagram, due to the limited added value in comparison to undertaking of this task. Following below is Brian’s diagram:

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