Dialogic, again

[Hal Snyder]

"Vance Shipley" <vances@REDACTED> writes:

> We have built, and use commercially, a dialogic driver which drives
> the DTI/240SC and DTI/241SC type cards we use.  We run a gen_fsm for 
> each timeslot and the driver messages back and forth directly to them.  
> The driver is a globally registered process called "dialogic" and the 
> timeslot processes are registered as well.  Currently we only do DS1 
> alarms, AB bit signaling and tone generation and reception.  No voice.  

We use 240-series cards, typically four to a server, with a custom
platform running on SCO ODT. Erlang looks very interesting as a way of
simplifying and updating significant parts of the code base.

Due to the condition of Dialogic drivers, UnixWare looks like the best
candidate for supporting the new servers. Haven't tried it yet for
ERTS, though.

I've been trying for years now to get Dialogic driver writers' docs
released so we can get better drivers and run on truly reliable
platforms including FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

> I do plan to release this driver opensource once I have the time to
> strip out the commercially sensitive parts and package it with a
> sample application.

That sounds terrific.

> I think we need a good sample "application" as all the contributions
> I've seen are simple source files.

We have been studying the Eddieware source as an example of a
nontrivial Erlang system, and learned a lot.

> We use the full application tools here to build releases which
> include supervision et. al. An example would have been very useful
> to us as we figured out how to write .rel, .app, etc. files.
> Hopefully our implementations are good guides but peer review will
> tell. :)

Ack, the payoff of Open Source. Please don't feel you have to wait
until everything is perfectly polished to share what you have learned
with the readers of this list!

> We also have drivers for Netaccess (Brooktrout) ISDN boards, Epicom
> DS3 cards and Audiocodes VoIP boards.

Not familiar with Epicom or Brooktrout, but others here more expert in
telephony surely are. Will be looking at Audiocodes soon.