To answer my own question in the title… the love for Asterisk that many individuals has has made Asterisk 12 a reality. The community helped drive the direction it should go and the developers (of which I am proud to call myself one) has made these ideas manifest. So with that I have to say…

Asterisk 12 Beta is here!

WOOT!!!

The response so far to Asterisk 12 has been insane. Never have I seen the community be so open and enthusiastic about a release. It is very refreshing and encouraging.

What excites me about Asterisk 12 is that the fundamental issues that have been known about for some time were tackled and with it a new approach allowing a MUCH wider range of developers to develop applications has emerged. This will see Asterisk evolve and continue through many years to come for the benefit of all.

What does Asterisk 12 bring with it, though?

I hear you asking this (or at least the voices in my head are)… so here you go:

• New release/development policy for the branch
• New bridging framework
• New bridging feature implementations (attended transfer, blind transfer)
• New parking implementation (res_parking)
• New data access layer framework (sorcery)
• New file access layer framework (bucket)
• New internal message bus (stasis)
• New RESTful interface (ARI)
• New SIP architecture (chan_pjsip)
• Replacement chan_agent functionality (app_agent_pool)
• Documented improved CDR behavior
• Documented improved AMI behavior

While I am not going to go into detail about these improvements in this post (look for future posts!) I must say that the changes are substantial and, even if you don’t know it, you will use at least one piece of the new work.

With that… download the Asterisk 12 beta at http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/releases/asterisk-12.0.0-beta1.tar.gz today and try it on a development system! We need feedback to drive bug fixes and feature additions. If you find any bugs be sure to file them on JIRA at https://issues.asterisk.org/jira

Cheers,