[SR-Users] Hello from newbie

[Alex Balashov]

On 02/04/2014 06:25 AM, Alex Lake wrote:

> That's very useful, thanks. Your guess as to my assumption was 100%
> correct.
> I presume, therefore, that the Kamailio community have no ambitions to
> become more "app"y. To be honest, I can quite sympathise with that.

Well, yes and no. :-)

On the one hand, the essence of Kamailio's flexibility and its power 
comes from its rather low-level nature. And, there are plenty of 
open-source and commercial platforms built on top of Kamailio that do 
wrap and abstract a lot of its complexities into higher-level 
presentation, and, like any project that has spawned such an ecosystem 
of third-party software, we'd be reluctant to steamroll over it by 
co-opting or absorbing the functionality into the project core.

 From the beginning, the intent of SER/OpenSER/Kamailio was to provide a 
really good toolbox, and I think that's the core competency of the 
project. It's been implemented at the corresponding level of abstraction 
for a toolbox from the ground up. I don't think that is going to change.

On the other hand, like any other project, obviously we would like to 
grow our ecosystem, promote the project, encourage wider adoption and 
understanding of it ("mindshare"), etc. There are varying opinions as to 
whether the best strategy to achieve this is by focusing on 
sophisticated operators who stand to benefit the most from Kamailio's 
technical nuances, or whether to focus on packaging Kamailio in a way 
that appeals to a wider mass-audience.

With regard to the latter, the project has actually evolved. The 
documentation has seen a lot of improvements in recent years. The stock 
config file that ships with Kamailio, which most novice to intermediate 
users base their installations on, has become more templated, with lots 
of options to enable and disable certain out-of-the-box features, and it 
does a lot more than it used to. Daniel-Constantin Mierla/ASIPTO are 
about to release a brand new, up-to-date Kamailio Admin book.

It may still feel "user-unfriendly" to new users, but trust me, it used 
to be even more so. :-)

-- Alex

-- 
Alex Balashov - Principal
Evariste Systems LLC
235 E Ponce de Leon Ave
Suite 106
Decatur, GA 30030
United States
Tel: +1-678-954-0670
Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/, http://www.alexbalashov.com/