What is Adhearsion?
“Adhearsion! Adhearsion! Adhearsion!” has been my mind’s mantra for many months now. Though Adhearsion.com went live Christmas along with the first release, it’s never received due announcement on my blog. Well, here you go folks.
Adhearsion is new twist on collaboration technologies. Its name derives from its VoIP-oriented origins as “adhesion you can hear” because it understands the VoIP picture and ties many VoIP-related (or, rather, collaboration related) technologies together in a comprehensive solution. From Adhearsion.com, these technologies include:
- Writing call-processing instructions
- Trading VoIP functionality
- Integrating with on-phone XML-based microbrowsers
- Collaborating with technology beyond VoIP
- Database integration for DB-driven VoIP apps
- Sophisticated relationships with Asterisk’s internals
- Opening up your PBX to RPC distributed computing
…to name a few. The end result is an exciting albeit lightweight package that is simply fun to hack with and beautifully simple. I wake up each morning giddy to resume my programming on Adhearsion from the previous night because each day brings some new and exciting possibility. This passion too is now shared — more are joining the project and more are seeing this vision. It’s great how all this is falling in place.
So great in fact my company Codemecca LLC is now the Adhearsion company. It will be the official sponsor of Adhearsion’s development and proliferation while bringing Adhearsion to the small business and enterprise markets through training, consulting, support, and so forth.
Technically, Adhearsion is written in Ruby with a sweet helper architecture. These “helpers” or framework extensions can be written in Ruby or C (more languages coming) and plug right into your app to extend, for example, the dial plan instructions or to introduce instant messaging functionality over Jabber.
In the spirit of “adhearing” things together, functionality brought by helpers can be used for your PBX, by other helpers, or — and this is the key — over Remote Procedure Calls (RPC). Take for example credit card processing. A new company wants to provide a public number into which customers can call and place orders for particular items. Also, because we’re living in the 21st century, they want to have the same credit card processing logic available to their PHP/Rails/Django/J2EE/whatever web apps. Writing the credit card processing logic in Adhearsion makes the functionality available to the PBX, but also to any other program or service needing it within the company. And by the way, writing that actual logic and having it set up like this would require nearly no effort whatsoever.
Stay tuned on this blog for more updates on Adhearsion. I’m hitting a wall with my custom blogging software Gosling and will soon be switching over to Typo. This will make the blog a much nicer place to facilitate my ramblings. 
