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!

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.

At Voxeo Labs we clearly have an affinity for clouds. Now that we provide the ability to easily push recorded audio files out of the Tropo cloud, we would like to provide an example of how to receive and post these files using other great clouds.

For this example we are going to use Sinatra to create a REST web service application. This application will then be deployed to Heroku where it will receive and then push the recorded audio files from Tropo up to an Amazon S3 account.

First, Sinatra provides a simple domain specific language in Ruby for creating REST web services, or whole web sites if you choose to. In this case we are using Sinatra to write our REST API to receive and then process the audio file. Creating an HTTP resource with Sinatra is as simple as this:

  get '/pizza' do
    order params['toppings']
    # Do some more stuff
  end

To get this resource you would then put this in your web browser:

  http://www.yourhost.com/pizza?toppings=pepperoni

If we take this a step further, writing the code to receive an audio file and post to Amazon S3 is not much harder:

  post '/post_audio_to_s3' do
    AWS::S3::S3Object.store(params['filename'][:filename],
                            File.open(params['filename'][:tempfile].path),
                            AWS_CONFIG['bucket_name'])
  end

In your Tropo app you may then write a script to record and send an audio file:

  answer
  say 'Welcome to the recording application'
  startCallRecording 'http://www.yourhost.com/post_audio_to_s3?filename=myfilename.wav'
  ask 'Do you like chocolate?', { :choices => 'yes, no' }
  stopCallRecording
  hangup

Now we have our web service, but where to run it? This is where Heroku comes in. Heroku is an ‘instant Ruby platform’ that allows you to deploy an application, via Git, and have it up and running on a scalable infrastructure in minutes. Lucky for us, Heroku excels at running Sinatra apps, and they even have the AWS-S3 library built in. All you need is a Heroku account, which is free to get started with a Blossom, and you are ready to start running your web service.

Last but not least, you will need an Amazon S3 account to store your files. Thats it, you may now start moving your files through the clouds to Amazon, or use this as an example to store them wherever you choose. The full application ready to deploy locally or to Heroku is available at Github here.