Before you get too excited, this chapter is not going to talk about dialplan configuration GUIs such as FreePBX or Digium’s Asterisk-GUI. We recognize that much of the success of Asterisk is due to the success of FreePBX-based projects such as AsteriskNOW, Trixbox, and PBX in a Flash, but in this book our focus is on Asterisk. As such, we will not be discussing any GUIs that essentially remove your relationship with the dialplan. It’s not that we’re against these things, but simply that we have only so much space in this book, and our goal is to look at Asterisk from the bottom up. Most Asterisk GUI projects hide the inner workings of Asterisk behind an interface, and for this reason they are not compatible with the goals of this book.

Our discussion of Asterisk web interfaces, therefore, will focus on interfaces to components other than the dialplan.

What we will do in this chapter is introduce a few projects that provide web interfaces into other parts of the system, and a selection of web-driven applications that are significant, useful, or recommended. In general, we have tended to focus on free and open source applications, but we will mention some commercial products where we feel it’s warranted.

There are many third-party applications that have been developed for Asterisk. The ones described here are among the best, at the time of this writing.