I’m sure I am searching for the wrong thing… I am trying to build a display interface based on HTML that shows the live state of an extension. ie a webpage that shows which extensions are on active calls, ringing, not available etc.
This sounds much more like an AMI application than an ARI one, although most of the work that will go into it will be web development, not Asterisk work.
You use AMI to get the state from asterisk, currently there’s an HTTP interface, that can deliver in multiple formats, including XML, you then process this data and present them on a webpage, like you would with any other data retrieved from an API.
The HTTP interface for AMI seems to be on it’s way out, from what I can understand from the wiki, but for the moment it still works, and is the easiest to interface with.
If you need to handle a large volume of extensions on one system, polling Asterisk could result in bad performance, in that situation, you setup a service to monitor events describing state change on extensions, and store that for your web application to consume.