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Perhaps "roadshow" isn't the right term but I am doing quite a bit of Adhearsion and VoIP promotion. Below is the current list. As I land more, I'll expand it:

Past speaking events:

• Emerging Telephony, San Francisco, Feb 27th
• Gotham Ruby Conference, NYC, April 21st
• Boulder/Denver.rb, May 15th
• Asterisk Developers Conference, Atlanta, May 22nd

Upcoming speaking events:

• Cluecon, Chicago, June 26th
• PDX.rb, Portland, July 3rd
• Ruby Hoedown, Raleigh, Aug. 10th
• Lone Star Ruby Conference, Austin, Sept. 8th
• Astricon, Phoenix, Sept. 24th

Unconfirmed Events:

• FOSCON, Portland, July 26th

If you are a member of a Ruby brigade or Asterisk users group and would like me to present, shoot me an email. My contact info is available on the Adhearsion contact page.

Ahh, it’s such a good feeling when you know you just wrote a really awesome feature. Last Saturday, late at night as I was trying to force myself asleep, I had an epiphany that solved the last hurdle I had with implementing a caching system in Adhearsion. The next morning I sat down and busted out a nineteen line method that took me about twenty minutes to write but another ninety minutes to document!

This cache method now lets Adhearsion totally bypass interpreting the dial plan for incoming calls which have already been cached. Does your dial plan make heavy use of your database? Does it use a really “expensive” helper that’s very resource-intensive? Are you pushing hundreds of calls a minute? So what? You can cache now!

For those that want the nitty-gritty, real documentation, see Adhearsion’s RDocs at http://rdocs.adhearsion.com. Scroll down in the top-right pane until you find cache().

I feel if Rembrandt had written this method, its usage still wouldn’t have come out as beautiful.

cache :for => 1.hour do
    play weather_report('Dallas, Texas')
end

... or, how about this hottie:

cache :per => extension do
    user = User.find_by_extension extension
    speak "Calling #{user.name}" 
    dial user, :for => 1.minute
end

... which will store different caches based on the extension the user dialed. Since many IVRs route depending solely on this variable, caching in this case is both smart and fast. The variable per which the caches are stored can be virtually anything.

For the Ruby hackers, here’s the cache method I implemented.

The epiphany I had was to use the return value of Ruby’s handy Kernel#caller method as a Hash key which uniquely identifies the FILE and LINE which invoked cache. Without this, I wouldn’t be able to distinguish between stored caches which occur in the same file or the same context. In the global cache variable ($cache_dir), this Hash of caller()s maps stack traces to another Hash which contains the constraints for the call—that is any use of the :per Hash key argument. This second nested Hash’s constraining keys map to an Array accessed as a queue of Strings which are simply rawr()ed to Asterisk. The time-to-live (specified with the :for Hash key argument) is stored as index 0 of the Array as a Time object. You can see this being stored with the “ttl.from_now” line and accessed with the “queue.first < Time.now” comparison.

For the bolder Adhearsion hackers, I’d like to call to arms anyone who’d be willing to really destroy Adhearsion with stress tests. There’s an open-source SIP stress tester developed by Hewlett Packard called SIPp with which you could pound your Adhearsion-managed Asterisk PBX.

This is the first of many substantial performance improvements coming. I’ve a few other tricks up my sleeves. :)

Woot! Linux Journal Magazine, the original magazine of the Linux community and a fantastic barometer for exciting new open-source technologies, has published an article I wrote about Adhearsion in their March 2007 issue. These are the guys that had DHH’s smug mug on the cover of their issue devoted almost entirely to Ruby a few months ago.

This issue’s concentration is VoIP, hence Adhearsion’s inclusion. Thus far it’s the best overview of Adhearsion for a newbie so I recommend to everyone reading this now a trip down to your closest Barnes & Nobles to pick up this copy. No really. Go get a copy. Stop reading my blog, grab your keys, and go.

I chose to send Linux Journal my article because I have an enormous respect for them. I’ve been a reader of their issues for many months and with every issue I find something great. Hopefully people can say the same with this issue referring to Adhearsion. :)

Jay’s got pics:

“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 21^st 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. :)