No compromise

In this book you will, hopefully, learn many new things. At its conclusion you will have the knowledge to build and successfully implement systems that combine great performance, resilience and stability. In order to do so, we will mainly consider "pure" Asterisk systems that require a deep understanding of the dialplan and configuration files without the safety-net of a GUI in between. Think of it as learning to become a great car mechanic. You can certainly be a good mechanic earning a good living by learning how to use a laptop plugged into an engine management system. But if you want to take that extra step to being a true master of the trade then you need to understand at a very deep level just how the internal combustion engine works. So it is with Asterisk. It is perfectly feasible to put very good solutions together using GUI-based systems such as the Digium-owned Switchvox, Trixbox (formerly Asterisk@Home) or PBX in a Flash, but to construct the best systems you will need to understand what is happening "under the hood" so that you can tweak them appropriately to achieve or exceed the customers' expectations.

One advantage of eschewing the GUI approach is a potential increase in performance and scalability through the use of a highly-optimized dialplan and a reduction in applications running on the server. However, there are many situations where a GUI is at least as appropriate, particularly if the customer wishes to carry out day-to-day management tasks. Therefore, in Chapter 12 we look at the implications of choosing a GUI-based solution over a "vanilla" system.