"Adhearsion" ~ Jay Phillips
RubyConf 2007Adhearsion is a framework for voice-over IP development.
Comparing Adhearsion to Rails. The web development domain of Rails is to generate properly formatted text and sent over HTTP. CGI and Perl helped make the internet ubiquitous. Then PHP came along and allowed developers to work with one language rather than a Perl API to CGI. Rails didn’t ignore the hard part. The hard stuff is the interactions between the underlying systems. Rails did it right technologically and emotionally.
Telecom development is an exorcism. It’s been an oligopoly for a long time, there’s not innovation. People go out of their way to hate telecoms. Then, VoIP came along and said, “screw your land lines, we’re going over the internet.”
Asterisk telephony development is hell. There are 7303 lines of standard Asterisk configuration. There is no testing culture.
Your cellphone is a universal remote or a universal gamepad. Control your media center. Awesome home automation. Use your phone to control your blinds, lights, temperature. Phone-controlled Roomba. WRT, Linux install. Spoof caller ID. Confuse automated telemarketers.
Adhearsion is abstracted and portable between people, operating systems. It is simple but far more powerful than Asterisk. It’s extensible because there’s a component system that lets you implement and trade various small VoIP functionalities. Its internals are open so you can adhere it to your domain. It’s good for the entire ecosystem - it’s cheaper for business, it makes developers happy.
Before Adhearsion, you had to paint with your fingers. You had not much skill or room to improve. Afterwards, you are extremely happy like Bob Ross and paint happy little trees.
The new version of Adhearsion, 0.8.0, is being moved to trunk today. The new stuff includes the components system, a call routing DSL, FreeSWITCH integration, better Rails app integration, the directory structure is dynamic, it is much more stable, tested, Capistrano integration, phone provisioning.
How can a computer call a cell phone? You configure SIP protocol.
The new version of Asterisk from O’Reilly has a section on Adhearsion. Great source for hacking VoIP and is highly recommended. Jay is writing a book called “Ruby and Telephony” with the Pragmatic Programmers.
If you’re setting up an office with 1,000 phones, you currently have to set up an SMTP server that is dependent on the vendor/model of the phone and make other difficult configurations. Adhearsion solves that problem and uses ActiveRecord to do it.
http://adhearsion.com
Being worked on by Marcel Molina, Chad Fowler, and Rich Kilmer.
Jay is showing demos where he calls into a conference, where sound files are played upon calling a number, where games are played that recognize which numbers you dial (“dial zero to talk to a representative”).