Now that AdhearsionConf has wrapped up and I have had a bit of time to reflect, I wanted to write up a bit on the experience results of the first ever Adhearsion developers conference.
The conference got off to a great start with an excellent presentation by Adhearsion's creator, Jay Phillips. Jay shared some of the background of Adhearsion and, perhaps most importantly, a list of ideas for future directions of the Adhearsion project. His ideas were well considered and really set the tone for the discussions the rest of the weekend. Among the ideas he presented were:
- A central repository for information about re-useable components (more on that in a bit)
- An Alarms DSL for creating events in response to error conditions such as AMI disconnects, database trouble or perhaps even certain types of call failures
- A Call Routing DSL to enable routing to be done within Adhearsion, freeing the developer from tying his application to a specific channel or endpoint
- SuperManager, an abstraction for AMI Events and Actions, which could be re-useable with future EventSocket work for FreeSWITCH.
- Bringing Agile development and comprehensive testing to telephony applications
This brings me to the next big thing to come out of AdhearsionConf: AHNHub. In response to Jay's comments about a central repository for Adhearsion components, Chris Matthieu got right to work. Within minutes (before Jay even finished talking!) Chris had set up AHNHub.com and @ahnhub. As the weekend progressed he worked hard to get a foundation in place and soon we will be able to publish components directly from Github! Stay tuned for future announcements and documentation on this exciting development.
Other presentations included Michel Vaillancourt on his and Adhearsion's involvement with the very exciting BlocJam project at MUTEK in Montreal. Troy Davis spoke on a very cool new mock-AGI server he created that will make testing and developing AGI applications much more accessible and rapid. Eric Lindvall presented some awesome ideas gleaned from real-world experience running Adhearsion apps, including monitoring, fault tolerance and deployment tooling. Finally, I spoke about Adhearsions's Roadmap taking us well into 2011.
Out of the roadmap discussion came some talk of how to get Adhearsion to 1.0. The consensus reached was that Adhearsion is already in production and has a very established and reliable feature set. Rather than wait for the time it takes to develop support for additional telephony engines, we will be looking at fixing all outstanding bugs in the 0.8.x branch and using that as a base to release Adhearsion 1.0. For more information on our plans you can always visit our Roadmap wiki page.
Finally I want to give a big shout out and thanks to Voxeo Labs/Tropo for supporting the Adhearsion project and organizing and sponsoring this fantastic event. Also thanks to NextSpace SF for convenient and comfortable meeting space. If you're looking for co-working in San Francisco, check them out. A special thanks to John Higgins and Jason Goecke for the logistics. And, of course, thanks to all the attendees and speakers. You made this event truly special.