JavaScript, From Your Browser To Your Telephone

Anthony Minessale writes “In 1995, Brendan Eich changed the face of the Internet forever with the introduction of JavaScript; an object orientated scripting language that came standard on the once dominant Netscape Navigator Internet Browser. Ten years later amidst the aftermath of the browser wars of the late 90’s and the bursting Dot-Com bubble, JavaScript still stands tall, implemented in just about every web browser available and now you can use it on your telephone!

Anthony Minessale, a software developer, one-time-webmaster in the days of old, has taken the trusty tool and added it to an open source phone system called Asterisk. This makes it possible to make a phone call to the system and have that call answered and maintained by a JavaScript file of your choice. Using the language, you can record audio, play it back, collect digits, interface with an external system and even transfer the call to another destination. “The main reason I developed this was so people who want to make interactive voice response systems could use a familiar interface to do so.” Anthony commented. The project, dubbed “res_js”, is based on the Spider Monkey JavaScript engine which is the same engine developed by and used in the Mozilla project for their web browser. Minessale, who has done a great deal of development on the Asterisk project, also has embedded Perl and SQLite into respective plug-in modules. The lead developers of several open source PBX systems are going to speak at the upcoming ClueCon convention in Chicago, IL Aug 3-5 (http://www.cluecon.com./ The Asterisk PBX is available at (http://www.asterisk.org/ and Anthony’s add-ons are published at PBX Freeware (http://www.pbxfreeware.org./“