Summary

Lua is a great choice for building simple and elegant voice applications for interacting with callers. It is very lightweight and is therefore scalable. It has a simple syntax that is easy to learn and there is ample online documentation.

In this chapter, we accomplished a number of objectives:

• Became acquainted with basic Lua syntax and control structures

• Wrote several scripts that demonstrate how to interact with a caller, including answering, hanging up, playing sound files, playing Phrase Macros, and accepting input from the caller

• Learned how to use the freeswitch object to send log messages to the console and to execute API commands

• Installed LuaSQL and demonstrated how to connect to a PostgreSQL database from within a Lua script

• Built mod_curl and enabled it to be loaded by default

• Demonstrated the use of curl requests to perform web calls from within a Lua script

• Became familiar with Lua's pattern-matching syntax

Now that we have a basis for writing scripts to interact with a caller...