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It was about one year ago that the Adhearsion name came to be, along with an invigorating second wind to develop it after writing Rails apps for several months and seeing real Ruby development. The ease and sense I saw Ruby make in the web development scene was an enormous inspiration to build Adhearsion into what it is today and what it will soon become.

It's this near future that excites me the most. For the past few months I've been intensively working on a rewrite of the Adhearsion core and it's showing great promise. Since I've never formally announced my intentions, here is what the community can expect from Adhearsion v0.8.0:

• Sustained quality. An enormous problem with Adhearsion 0.7.x has been avoiding regression when changes are made. The codebase today is unfortunately very monolithic and, consequentially, very easy for a change in one area to affect the rest of the framework without my knowing until someone reports it on the mailing list. This time around I am working on 100% RSpec coverage of Adhearsion and using the development principles of Behavior Driven Development. The telecom world expects rock solid dependability and Adhearsion should never be a question mark.
• First-class community portal. Another big issue in the Adhearsion scene I'm noticing is a weak adhesion (pun intended) of the Adhearsion community. My vision long ago was to facilitate the exchanging of Adhearsion-related source code on the official Adhearsion website. The problem has been in finding time to develop this community portal. Thankfully an opportunity arose to work with Alex Pilafian of Sikanrong.com on the site. In just the one month we've been developing it we've made enormous headway. Imagine this: a community-maintained open-source call center application exists online at Adhearsion.com; the "ahn" command allows dead-simple ease of deployment with only "ahn install appname"; suddenly you receive a fully functional call center PBX with AJAX-enabled web frontend, PBX clustering support, Java integration (mentioned below), easily maintainable application code, and all of the other benefits of Adhearsion. Yes, it's pretty exciting, disruptive stuff. I'll write more about this as it nears completion.
• Steps toward PBX independence. In doing some consulting for Gaboogie, I've been steadily working on FreeSwitch bindings to Adhearsion for them which will ultimately become open-source and standard with Adhearsion. FreeSwitch is still pre-beta at the moment but does tackle scalability very well. Unlike Asterisk where most of the functionality is already written and must be abstracted, FreeSwitch simply opens APIs for the implementor to develop his own functionality. This means more work on my end but, ultimately, a more robust and modifiable set of VoIP applications.
• New Asterisk Manager Interface library. Adhearsion AMI features are presently based on the two-year old RAMI library which exposes an API to read and execute Asterisk events outside of live phone calls. The library definitely shows its age, being a very tangly mess of unintuitive code that I'd expect from the non-Prototype Javascript world but not from the Ruby '07 scene. Dave Troy and I sat down at the Asterisk Developers Conference in Atlanta a few months ago and pounded out an unprecedented new library that vastly improves Asterisk integration.
• JRuby compliance. At RailsConf 2007, Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo demonstrated deploying Mephisto on Glassflish in front of our eyes during a three-hour tutorial session. In the lobby immediately after their presentation I was able to replicate their success by deploying a simple "hello world" Rails app. Now with JRuby v1.0.0 stable out in the wild with "complete" 1.8.5 compliance, Adhearsion can be deployed seamlessly with other Java technologies. With Microsoft's efforts in the IronRuby space, a Ruby interpreter written in .NET, Adhearsion's use of the Ruby platform will make integration with that microcosm native, too. Of course, provided Microsoft doesn't fork our language! (J#, anyone?)
• More on Micromenus. With both the advent of the iPhone and its need for a good SDK, I've been working on the new Micromenus namespace that will render special iPhone-specific interfaces. With this complete, database-driven Micromenus applications can be busted out in minutes, complete with Asterisk integration out of the box. I don't want to spill these beans quite yet so stay tuned. :)

There are a few other things I'll leave in as surprises for the 0.8.0 release but this list should whet your appetite.

Beyond Adhearsion v0.8.0 there are many things on the roadmap, some of which will be axed and some of which will remain. Perhaps the biggest feature in my mind for version 1.0.0 stable will be a real abstraction of the PBX, letting the implementor not worry about any of the inconsistencies of the underlying framework. Adhearsion v0.9.x will be the first step toward the PBX independence and, when sufficient and stable, the 1.0 release will be triggered.

In the meantime, I'd love for others' help in this exciting ramping up phase! Let me know if you've like to lend a hand!