AdhearsionConf was a HUGE success!  Approximately 30 people attended the first Voxeo Labs’ sponsored AdhearsionConf event last week in San Francisco (in person and on the stream).

During Jay Phillip’s (@Jicksta) Adhersion keynote, he suggested that we needed an easier way for the Adhearsion community to find and share components (plug-ins).  Fifteen minutes later @ChrisMatthieu registered and contributed the domain AhnHub.com.  Fifteen more minutes went by and a starter AhnHub.com website was written in Ruby on Rails and deployed to Heroku.

By the end of the event, AhnHub was receiving automatic component repository listings and commit updates from GitHub.  All the component author has to do to share their components with AhnHub is add http://ahnhub.com to their repository’s post-receive hooks as illustrated in the example below:

AhnHub automatically lists all known Adhearsion components on the home page.  Additional components can be added to the directory by updating the GitHub post-receive hook on the component’s repository.  A record of each commit update is also logged in the directory so that others can see the dates of the updates and corresponding links and messages associated with the commit.

The component directory is currently sorted in descending order by number of watchers per repository.  You can also link out to the home page of the component and quickly note whether the repository is private or public and view the number of watchers and forks on the repository.

Future enhancements will include GitHub OAuth authorization, tagging, and better search capabilities.  This is a great example of how a community with a variety of skills can contribute to various open source projects.  If you would like to get involved in this project, please notify Chris Matthieu to be added as a Collaborator on AhnHub.com.

The first ever AdhearsionConf is gearing up to start on Saturday! The advance team is already in San Francisco ensuring the venue is ready and all of the logistical planning is complete. So, without further adéu here is the agenda and additional details:

See everyone there!

The first AdhearsionConf will be held in San Francisco on the weekend of August 14-15, 2010.

Jay Phillips, the creator of Adhearsion, will be joining us for two days of talks, discussions, hacking and pair programming on all things Adhearsion.

What is Adhearson?
Adhearsion is the first fully-featured open source Ruby framework for Asterisk and an easy way to write voice-enabled applications. In the age of the social web, what other technologies are more social than voice?  Adhearsion empowers your code to handle and route inbound and outbound phone, VoIP, and Skype calls automatically, just like it handles normal web traffic.

Who should attend AdhearsionConf 2010?
Ruby developers who are already using Adhearsion or Asterisk or ANY Web 2.0 developers who would like to better understand how they can use Adhearsion to open up their applications to a whole new audience of VoIP, Skype and phone-based users.

If you’re not familiar with Jay (and/or Adhearsion), here’s a video interview from InfoQ where Jay Phillips explains what Adhearsion is.  We’ll also have other folks on deck that will be sharing their innovative uses of Adhearsion.

Additional speakers and sponsors are still being hashed out, but we’ll post the agenda and exact location as soon as we have them all solidified.  All you have to do is REGISTER EARLY and get yourself to San Francisco in August.

And, yes, there will be free food and possibly free kitten mittens.

We would like to announce the first AdhearsionConf to be held in San Francisco from August 14th to the 15th. Jay Phillips, the creator of Adhearsion, will be joining us for two days of talks, discussions, hacking and pair programming on all things Adhearsion. We also have other folks on deck that will be sharing their innovative uses of Adhearsion.

This event is sponsored by Voxeo Labs, so there will be no charge for the event itself. The final schedule and venue will be published soon. So mark your calendars and see you all in San Francisco in August!

After a long time coming I would like to announce the release of Adhearsion v0.8.4! Adhearsion was originally created by Jay Phillips (@jicksta) in 2006. Since that time it has evolved to become one of the most complete and widely adopted development frameworks for the Asterisk open-source telephony engine.

This release marks the continuation of the platform with some major enhancements and bugfixes:

• Support for Asterisk 1.6 (continued backward compatibility with Asterisk 1.4)
• Added support for ActiveLDAP
• ActiveRecord now works properly with Adhearsion components
• Daemonizing of Adhearsion no longer truncates log files
• Escape commands sent to Asterisk via AGI
• Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) events now work when daemonized
• Various enhancements for improved Asterisk 1.6 support
• Various bugfixes

(For more details you may see the CHANGELOG and Lighthouse tickets.)

I would like to thank Ben Klang (@bklang), Troy Davis (@troyd), Eric Lindvall (@lindvall), Michel Villancourt (@jkl5group), Wayne Walker and so many others in the community that continue to support and move this project forward. There are more things in the works, so stay tuned for additional announcements coming soon.

For those of you new to Adhearsion you may install with ’sudo gem install adhearsion’. The source code is available on Github and the gem is on Rubygems.org.

I would like to welcome Ben Klang (@bklang) as a core contributor to the Adhearsion project. Ben has been active in the Adhearsion community for sometime, contributing patches, helping out on the Google Group and keeping the momentum of the community going.

Our first order of business with Ben now on board will be to release Adhearsion v0.8.4. The key focus of this release will be:

• Asterisk v1.6 Support
• DRb/ActiveRecord/Components Bugfix
• General Bugfixes off of Lighthouse

There is much more to come and we welcome all input from the community as we build our priorities. Thanks for all of the great support from Ben and everyone else so far!

There is much more we are preparing on the Adhearsion front, so stay tuned.

We have been busy working on our new Moho project over the last year, and are now in the process of doing lots of exciting new things with it. A plan has been in the work for some time to port Adhearsion onto Moho, so that it may run both on Asterisk and a deploy ready cloud like Tropo, all with minimal impact to Adhearsion applications already written.

With this, we have moved the official project of Adhearsion to Github. You may now find the official source code repository at http://github.com/adhearsion/adhearsion. The website will continue to be at Adhearsion.com where we have now begun monitoring the services from our 7×24 network operations center.

Stay tuned for more on the Adhearsion front.

The Adhearsion team is excited to announce today the new directions Adhearsion, Tropo and Voxeo will be taking, including the launch of Voxeo Labs.

Adhearsion arose in 2006 from frustrations Jay Phillips had while writing telephony applications with Asterisk, the predominant open-source telephony platform. Inspired by the nascent Ruby on Rails web development framework, Jay began applying the same modern software development principles to an application layer than ran above Asterisk which ultimately became Adhearsion. As the Ruby and Rails spaces grew and Jay travelled the world to do consulting and speak at conferences, so grew the Adhearsion community. Today, over three years after Jay wrote the first versions of Adhearsion, the team is now two-strong with Jason Goecke having joined last year to help with the day-to-day complexities and coding associated with a consulting company and open-source project.

The Adhearsion project’s founding principle was simple: make telephony accessible and exciting. Out of this grew the desire to build a hosting company which mitigated the largest problem people having with using Adhearsion: hosting and operationalizing a telephony system after they actually write it. Thus began Adhearsion’s discussions with Voxeo.

In January 2009 Voxeo began planning a new scripting language-based platform named Tropo that had similar ambitions as Adhearsion. As the Tropo team started planning how robust frameworks like Adhearsion could work atop Tropo, the plans for a generic, ideal hosted telephony engine arose and became overwhelmingly exciting.

With the added power of the cloud-friendly Tropo engine and the robust simplicity of the open-source Adhearsion framework atop it, telephony can truly become accessible to the many people with great ideas but justified hesitation about the telephony status quo. With Voxeo Labs, Adhearsion and Voxeo will further develop Adhearsion, Tropo, and new exciting applications that utilize cutting edge web and open-source technologies.

What does this mean for the Adhearsion community?

Voxeo Labs is committed to open-source. This announcement should be seen as Adhearsion achieving a critical step to its overall success: a reliable hosting solution atop a great platform from a very trusted name in the telephony hosting business. The open-source development will remain as active as ever, if not moreso, as the new power of Tropo enables new and innovative features for the framework.

We would like to thank the community for all of their support that has allowed us to continue to take Adhearsion forward. We will continue that evolution to ensure the developer community has the tools it needs to develop compelling applications and accomplish all of their exciting telephony ambitions!

For the full press release, click here.