Asterisk: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition

Chapter 19. Asterisk REST Interface

People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

Isaac Asimov

The Asterisk REST Interface (ARI) was created to address the limitations inherent in developing external or enhanced functionality outside Asterisk. While AGI allows you to trigger external applications, and AMI allows you to externally supervise and control calls in progress, any attempt to integrate both into a complete external application quickly becomes complex and kludgy. ARI allows developers to build a stand-alone and complete application, using Asterisk as the underlying engine.

As of this writing, ARI requires a very basic dialplan in order to trigger the Stasis() dialplan application, which then hands the channel over to ARI. By the time you read this, it’s very likely that this requirement has changed, as the Asterisk developer community has actively been working on allowing ARI to spawn without any dialplan in the middle.

Using an external interface such as ARI to control Asterisk is not necessarily going to make your life easier. The skills required to implement and troubleshoot applications of this type require a comprehensive skill set, in not only your language of choice, but also in Linux system administration, Asterisk administration, network troubleshooting, and fundamental telephony concepts. For the skilled developer, ARI can give you the power you want in your applications, but for someone learning, we recommend you consider mastering ...