Integrating Asterisk and Ruby on Rails for Asterisk Geeks

I’m down in Dallas for Astricon. It’s fun. I normally keep my ear out for folks mentioning asterisk, but here it’s terrible, everybody’s talking about it. At Ruby conf there was a breakout session where we talked about asterisk and i gave a short version of my asterisk for rails hackers talk. I’ve been trying to get some energy behind RAI – Ruby Asterisk Integration to restart the state of ruby libraries for asterisk. The talk for astricon is a bit different, going the other direction, rails for asterisk hackers.

The thing is, yesterday i was sitting in the asterisk development sessions and i realized that i hadn’t tried asterisk 1.4 beta 2. Silly me, i was like, I’ll try that. Well, when i went back to check my example app, the one i was going to build in the tutorial, asterisk core dumped when it tried to open the agi connection. Asterisk 1.4 has a new build system, it now uses the standard configure scripts, i really like it. Unfortunately it blew away my old asterisk 1.2 configuration. I tried to revert back and build 1.2 again, but it didn’t overwrite the 1.4 config files. It was a mess. I had to go up and give the talk without either one working.

When i got to the point of making a demo, David Troy from Pop Vox gave an example of his distributed volunteer calling app he build for this election cycle and used for the Lamont campaign. It’s a very cool app and was build with ragi and ruby on rails.

Simon from Toronto was there, he built the zoip interactive voice driven zork game which he was demoing at eTel last year. Tomorrow he’s going to go through how he built it.

So, here’s the presentation: Rails for Asterisk Hackers at Astricon 2006.

And the the libraries mentioned: RAI, RAGI, and Ruby-AGI.