Q.1.: What does Yet Another Telephony Engine mean?

Q.2.: Why is Yate written in C++ ?

Q.3.: From where comes "We don't dereference NULL"?

Q.4.: What does Yate have to do with Asterisk?

Q.5.: What kind of SIP support does Yate have?

Q.6.: Why has the Yate project forked the IAX library? What makes the fork worth all the trouble usually associated with such a move?

Q.7.: Why is Yate sending a CANCEL and a BYE to tear down a not yet answered SIP call?

Q.1.: What does Yet Another Telephony Engine mean?

A.1.: Most of the telephony technologies (ISDN,H.323,SIP) are point to point. This means that there is no big difference between a server and a client. A "telephony engine" tries to give you support to let you use it as a client or as a server (or proxy) in the way that is suitable for your enviroment.

Q.2.: Why is Yate written in C++ ?

A.2.: C++ is a superset of C, so we get the flexibility and power of C together with the OO (Object Oriented) support of C++. We need C++ OO technology mainly because otherwise Yate can become a difficult to maintain project. A nice explanation about C++ can be found at http://www.cplusplus.com/info/description.html and reasonable one at http://www.star.bnl.gov/public/comp/train/WhyC++.txt

Q.3.: From where comes "We don't dereference NULL"?

A.3.: This sentence comes from before Yate, and we hope it defines the Null Team. Anyway it means that we prefer to write good, well designed code so then we can spend more time on developing new features than fixing bugs in already written code. And we take bugs very seriously, trying to Honour the bug

Q.4.: What does Yate have to do with Asterisk?

A.4.: Yate is not an Asterisk fork; in fact, the original idea for Yate comes mostly from Bayonne.

Q.5.: What kind of SIP support does Yate have?

A.5.: The Yate developers have explored several different open source SIP libraries but found them lacking, so Yate uses its own SIP stack, which may be reusable in a single or multi thread module for applications like clients, servers, or proxies. Handling of custom SIP messages can be implemented in internal or external (script) modules.

Q.6.: Why has the Yate project forked the IAX library? What makes the fork worth all the trouble usually associated with such a move?

A.6.: We like to contribute to other free software projects. For IAX2 the solution was to use either libiax2 (a client library) or to write everything from scratch.

We got libiax2 but the original copyright holder requires a disclaimer to add our patch, and we didn't give the disclaimer.

Our libiax2 have a few bugs fixed like in the way it is dealing with codecs, and it can be used for an iax2 server (like Yate).

In libyateiax we have support for trunking which is important to reduce bandwidth usage between servers.

Q.7.: Why is Yate sending a CANCEL and a BYE to tear down a not yet answered SIP call?

A.7.: To proactively prevent problems with the call being answered just before the other side receives the CANCEL. Either the CANCEL or (almost always) the BYE will generate a harmless 481 answer.

If you don't find your question answered here, please check our mailing archive to see whether your issue was addressed before.

You can always contact us, we are looking forward to it.