Adhearsion 2009
If there’s even been a pivotal turning point for the Adhearsion project, it’s now.
We have several announcements to make all rolled up into this hugely important, albeit intentionally bite-size blog post. Each is extremely exciting and collectively I think they show the escalating pace of the Adhearsion space.
Meet Jason Goecke
Firstly, you may have noticed that I said “we have” instead of “I have.” Jason Goecke has been working with Adhearsion for many months and, until now, I haven’t properly introduced him to you all. Jason found the Adhearsion project in its earliest days and followed it at arm’s length for a few years as it matured. When we both found ourselves living in Silicon Valley, we met in person frequently and were excited about the potential future of Adhearsion if we combined forces. Jason has a strong background in telecoms and enterprise call centers. He was one of the earliest employees of Genesys, an early player in computer telephony integration, and is credited as an inventor on several of their patents. Jason brings broad international business expertise and a deep technical competence to the project.
He’s joined the Adhearsion project full time and will become an increasingly familiar face of it. With his help the project’s progress has already been accelerating and, I’m excited and confident to say, will continue to do so.
New Adhearsion Version!
I’ve been talking about Adhearsion v0.8.x for a long time now and it’s finally here. What started as a simple revision became a complete rewrite with more irresistible features bolted on, causing bittersweet delays. The delays were painful and perhaps a cause of community worry but they were an important tradeoff with the inconvenience of forcing people to work with leaky abstractions or us maintaining backwards compatibility with dramatically different codebases.
We feel the fruits of our due diligence now exemplify the innovative philosophical and technological standards to which the Adhearsion project vehemently adheres. If you’re the technical type and would like to peruse what’s new, check out this page.
New Website
This has been a long time in the coming. If you periodically checked the Adhearsion site, you probably noticed quite a few different approaches we’ve taken as we bounced from wiki engine to wiki engine. I’ve finally settled on Confluence for docs.adhearsion.com and a custom Rails app to serve the only slightly dynamic main site Adhearsion.com. Communicating and organizing a lot of information effectively is always a problem for sophisticated open-source projects and the solutions we have now will be more future-friendly.
Free Adhearsion Sandbox
We’re especially excited about this bit of news. The Adhearsion sandbox fixes the problem we’ve had with enticing people to try telephony development. Setting up the underlying telephony platform has always been the most difficult task for Adhearsion newcomers and the sandbox makes this downright trivial.
Every new Adhearsion app now comes with an initially disabled component named “sandbox”. When this component is enabled with a user’s sandbox username and password, the newly started Adhearsion app will control any calls coming to the SIP URI username@sandbox.adhearsion.com. The user doesn’t even have to have ever heard the name Asterisk.This is a huge advancement in bringing voice development to the masses and the fact that Adhearsion is able to function this way by just enabling a plugin clearly affirms the potential the new Adhearsion version offers.
Try Adhearsion!
If you have been lurking in the community and waiting to give Adhearsion a try, now is the time. Check out the new Adhearsion.com site for more information!
