astGUIclient or ViCiDial?

[martinch]

Good morning guys,

I had a question. What is astGUIclient in relation to ViCiDial or are they names for the same thing? Always made me curious. Was astGUIclient a working title or initial name of what we now know as ViCiDial?

Also, am I styling ViCiDial correctly? I vaguely remember seeing this style in the codebase and just defaul to it. I've also seen VICIdial too (like on the logo).

Thanks
Martin

[mflorell]

The Asterisk GUI Client(astGUIclient) came first, and was the framework for the "astVICIDIAL" that came a few months after astGUIclient was created.

The astGUIclient client application(which is still part of the VICIdial install, available at "agc/astguiclient.php") was created to offer enhanced features to "dumb-phone" users on an Asterisk phone system, allowing recording of phone calls, conferencing and optionally, limited administrative functions of the phone calls happing on the same server as the phone you log in as.

"astGUIclient" is still the name of the Open-Source project, although almost nobody uses the actual web client of that name anymore.

As for the name "VICIdial", it has changed several times over the years, but for at least the last 10 years it has been preferred to be shown as "VICIdial" like the logo shows, although you will still see alternative configurations of the capitalization throughout the code.

[martinch]

Thanks for clearing that up Matt! I never thought to explore astguiclient.php but now I have...it's earliest log entry is from 2005;

Code: Select all

# 50215-1356 - Proof-of-concept test of XMLHttpRequest for astGUIclient web

I can see how VICIdial was inspired by astGUIclient as at a code level, the resemblance is somewhat uncanny but VICI is like astGUIclient on steroids. It has grown into a monster codebase (at my last count it was 250k lines!).

Thanks to you, the VICIdial team and all the contributors over the years. Wonderful product. You're a FOSS luminary.

Cheers,
Martin.

[mflorell]

Thank you for all of the compliments

I should mention that both astGUIclient and astVICIDIAL were actually first written in 2003 using Perl/Tk. They both required installing a Perl runtime on every agent workstation, along with manual configurations. Changing over to a web-based AJAX/Javascript framework made it MUCH easier to deploy and support, and the rest is history