A Primer to AGI: Asterisk Gateway Interface

Jan 29, 2009, 10:33 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Nir Simionovich)

[ Thanks to Ramsai Karri for this link. ]

"As you can see, the invocation is similar to the invocation of any other Asterisk dialplan application. However, there is one major difference between a regular dialplan application and an AGI script—the resources an AGI script consumes.While an internal application consumes a well-known set of resources from Asterisk, an AGI script simply hands over the control to an external process. Thus, the resources required to execute the external AGI script are now unknown, while at the same time, Asterisk consumes the resources for managing the execution of the AGI script.Ok, so BASH isn't much of a resource hog, but what about Java? This means that the choice of programming language for your AGI scripts is important. Choosing the wrong programming language can often lead to slow systems and in most cases, non-operational systems.

"While one may argue that the underlying programming language has a direct impact on the performance of your AGI application, it is imperative to learn the impact of each. To be more exact, it's not the language itself, but more the technology of the programming language runtime that is important. The following table tries to distinguish between three programming languages' families and their applicability to AGI development."

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