Adhearsion, Telephony, XMPP (Interview)

Wynn caught up with Ben Klang and Ben Langfeld of the Adhearsion project to talk about Adhearsion 2.0, the future of telephony apps, XMPP, and more.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Featuring:

• Wynn Netherland – Twitter, GitHub

Show Notes:

• Ben Klang Principal/Technology Strategist at Mojo Lingo, Project Lead for Adhearsion.
• Ben Langfeld developer at Mojo Lingo, member of Adhearsion core team.
• Adhearsion is an open source voice application framework.
• Rails developers will find some familiarity in Adhearsion’s controllers and routers.
• Adhearsion just released version 2.0.
• New in 2.0, Adhearsion supports multiple backends including Asterisk, PRISM, Tropo, and others.
• Tropo underwrites the development of Adhearsion and also provides features not available on Asterisk, such as high quality text-to-speech.
• IVR stands for Interactive Voice Response.
• Adhearsion plugins are simply gems that extend the Adhearsion DSL and are similar to Rails’ Railties.
• XMPP support has been extracted into a plugin.
• Adhearsion models voice applications as MVC.
• Planning is starting for the next Adhearsion Conf. Follow @AdhearsionConf for details.
• You can watch the AdhearsionConf videos.
• These well done videos were done by our friends Opus Video. We love their split screen presentation. Never miss the speaker or the slides.
• Video is still the frontier for telephony apps.
• Ben Langfeld loves XMPP and helps maintain the Blather library, written by Jeff Smick.
• XMPP pub-sub is hot right now, as employed by the likes of Superfeedr, the subject of Episdode 0.3.7.
• Punchblock “is a middleware library for telephony applications. Like Rack is to Rails and Sinatra, Punchblock provides a consistent API on top of several underlying third-party call control protocols.”
• Adhearsion uses Celluloid which makes Ruby “look and smell a bit like Erlang, but without the yuckiness.”
• Mike Perham, Tony Arcieri, and Charles Nutter inspire Ben and Ben.

Special thanks to Julius Francisco for helping to arrange this episode.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!