Adhearsion, Telephony, XMPP (Changelog Interviews #79)

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.

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Featuring:

• Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X

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!