Work is under way on Free switch, but is is a ground up re-write.
Yesterday, Star2Billing, the commercial arm of A2Billing was asked to talk at the Asterisk Atlanta user's group, and here are Areski's words.
So what are we planning next ? As I have mentioned in our last presentation, we are rebuilding A2Billing.
and this will be some kind of rewrite from Scratch.
Why do we need a new rewrite ?
- A2Billing, as it stands now, has been too restrictive in terms of design.
- It s a project on which it's hard to contribute.
- The code isn't well structured and the framework is proper to A2Billing and this makes it difficult for other developers to get into the code.
- the Interface doesn't take advantage of Ajax, and the templating system isn't great either.
We have been learning a lot building A2Billing, and so far we have provided a great solution which makes thousands of users happy, but we know that we can push this to a higher level and that s what weare aiming to do.
So our Goals ?- We are rebuilding A2B on a full MVC framework, using the Django.
The new rebuild will be modular and with a pluggable interface to ease contribution from the
community.
We want to provide a module forge, for instance if you want a payment module for worldpay,
this doesn't need to be part of the core application, as possibly it wouldn't be of interest to many people. but this should be download-able and easily pluggable into your A2Billing.
- We also want to push the design and get an appealing look and feel, Web 2.0 oriented.
Improve the structure, the ergonomics and the connectivity between the A2Billing elements.
- We also need a Flexible and independent Billing Module :
As some of you know, we currently have an AGI which is heavy and hardly portable to other
platforms.
The new rating engine, we are working on, will be platform independent and will offer much
more flexibility, we plan to make this easily portable to Asterisk and Freeswitch, and later to
other VOIP platforms.
So I hope this gives you an idea of where we are going... hopefully soon
We are targeting a first announcement this summer, so be patient and stay tuned
Thank you!
So if you have programming skills or resources, then I am sure Areski would be pleased of the help.