It has now been a busy two months since Jason invited me to join the Adhearsion project as its core maintainer. We have seen the long-awaited release of 0.8.4, which brought several bugfixes and support for Asterisk 1.6.0 (and later). We have seen an explosion of activity in the IRC channel (irc.freenode.net #adhearsion) and on the mailing list. Presentations have been made on the VoIP Users Conference (twice!), the Rubyology Podcast and at ClueCon in Chicago. At the end of this week we will have our first ever Adhearsion developers conference: AdhearsionConf!
Since the release of 0.8.4 the community has been hard at work on the next version to be released, which will be called 0.8.5. This release has some pretty cool new features. My favorite among them is the integration with Blather, an excellent XMPP library and DSL. Bringing the world of instant messaging to the world of telephony opens up a whole new world of possibilities. I spoke a bit about this at ClueCon and more will be said in the coming days. My personal feeling is that the possibilities are only now being explored and the potential for creative new applications mixing these technologies is limitless.
Aside from the new XMPP functionality, much work has been done on the internals of Adhearsion. We have committed hundreds of little fixes and closed many of open bugs on our bugtracker, some of which have been open for a long time. All unit tests are passing once again and numerous little tweaks have increased the framework's utility, consistency and polish. Feedback and testing from the community has been outstanding, promising to make this the very best release of Adhearsion yet.
Looking a bit further down the road we are looking to expand the reach of Adhearsion by bringing support to new telephony platforms. Our first target is to support FreeSWITCH's excellent EventSocket API. Some code is already committed in a branch on Github. We also plan to break out some of the magic that makes Adhearsion one of the best AGI/AMI consumers into separate gems so other developers can take advantage of the battle-tested functionality they deliver. More information on our future plans can be found on our roadmap.
If you are interested in helping out with these project goals, please fork us and send your pull requests. We love getting contributions. I would also recommend you find our IRC channel and drop by. I am proud to have joined such a helpful and friendly group of people. For more information on the project, visit our website at http://adhearsion.com