FreeSWITCH 1.0.3 Is Now Available

The FreeSWITCH team is pleased to announce the release of version 1.0.3. The developers have focused a lot of attention on quality in this release. The changelog has 127 items, most of which are bug fixes, tweaks, and improvements. However, a new FreeSWITCH release just wouldn't be complete without some new goodies. The new source tarball can be downloaded here. Let's review some of the improvements and new features.

FreeSWITCH now uses the Speex DSP resampler in lieu of libresample. The Speex resampler offers some performance benefits and features, for example volume gain. Also, Speex is licensed under the revised BSD license, which allows more flexibility for code customizations.

The build system has had some improvements as well. FreeSWITCH Can now build under uClibc, which allowed the AstLinux project to add support for FreeSWITCH. ODBC is now detected by autoconf which relieves the user from having to specify the "--enable-core-odbc-support" when running the configure script. We have also fixed the sounds install when building from source on Windows.

Several new modules have recently been added. In the contrib directory you will see something with an unusual name: mod_nibblebill. Don't let the name fool you - it is a perfect description of a very handy tool for those who do prepaid calling applications. Mod_nibblebill, submitted by Darren Schreiber, allows for real-time debiting of cash or credit (from a database) while calls are in progress. Please see the well-written mod_nibblebill wiki page for more information.

Also added to trunk is mod_lcr. As its name implies, mod_lcr implements LCR (Least Cost Routing) in FreeSWITCH. It can operate as a true dialplan (via transfer), invoked from the command line, or as a dialplan application. This module is a good counterpart to mod_easyroute, which handles inbound DID routing. With these two modules a user can build inbound and outbound call center functionality into his FreeSWITCH system.

Finally, the development version of mod_opal has been added. Mod_opal implements the Opal telephony library. Currently mod_opal supports H.323 and IAX2. The FreeSWITCH developers are definitely interested in community feedback for this module, so if you are in a position to try it out then by all means do so.

Those who have a love of a particular scripting language will be pleased to hear about the "ESL Wrapper" that Anthony created. The ESL is an Event Socket Library written in C. It is very fast and allows for a standardized means of communicating with FreeSWITCH via the event socket. The ESL wrapper is an intermediate layer that allows your favorite scripting language to talk to the event socket. The value here is that all of the socket communications are abstracted away from the programmer - all he needs to do is handled the sending and receiving of commands to and from the FreeSWITCH server. Supported languages are Lua, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby. Perl and PHP examples are available in the source/libs/esl directory. Those fluent in Lua, Python, and Ruby are invited to create sample scripts and submit them.

On the codec front there have been several developments. Those who have been wanting a way to use G.729a transcoding in FreeSWITCH now have a viable option: mod_dahdi_codec. This module allows those who have a Digium TC400B (which comes with G.729a fully licensed), to have 120 channels of G.729a or 92 channels of G.723.1. Other new codecs include AMR Wideband passthrough (mod_amrwb) and G.726 24k. The Speex codec has been updated to Speex 1.2rc1.

The dialplan as had a few improvements as well. Several new channel variables have been added that will allow for more control of dialing and handling of call results:

• failure_causes - Controls which failure causes will be considered as a failure to the bridge(s). This will change the default values for which continue_on_fail will fail by default unless continue_on_fail is set to true.
• instant_ringback - When set, ringback will not wait for indication before sending ringback tone to calling party.
• monitor_early_media_fail - Monitors early media for failure conditions, such as a busy signal. This allows faster processing of failed calls when ignoring early media.

The FreeSWITCH team would like to thank the community for their continued support of the project. Please keep up the good work, and keep on FreeSWITCHing!