So, with a small flourish and no small amount of relief, I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of Adhearsion 2.0, the open source framework for the creation of voice applications.

Here are some highlights of the changes relative to the latest Adhearsion 1.x:

• Adhearsion now supports multiple telephony engines! In particular we support Asterisk (as always) as well newly added support for PRISM via the open-standard Rayo protocol
• CallControllers make telephone functionality more Ruby-esque, more testable and are scientifically shown to make you happier
• A self-documenting configuration engine (“rake config:show”)
• A completely revamped plugin system makes adding and sharing Adhearsion functionality better than ever
• Did I mention the new website design and documentation?
• Way more stuff than I can reasonably list here.  You should check out the CHANGELOG and the Upgrade documentation.

I would like to take a moment and recognize the team that made this happen.  The Adhearsion project has exploded in the last year, and many of the people who worked so hard to bring you Adhearsion 2 are actually new to the community within the last year!  A special thanks to Ben Langfeld who has driven much of this development effort and contributed fixes to many bugs and added new functionality in some of our dependency packages in the process of making this happen.  I also want to thank our sponsors, especially Tropo, for not only funding direct development, but helping to evangelize and organize.  Tropo has been a fantastic collaborator throughout Adhearsion’s lifetime.

Now, you might be thinking “all of the above sounds great, but how stable can it really be? Is it webscale?”  The answer is “very stable” and “yes”, respectively.  But I don’t want you to just take my word for it.  A few weeks back, I bet Ben Langfeld a double sawbuck (that is, an Andrew Jackson, a USD $20) that Adhearsion 2 wasn’t ready to take a fully loaded server’s worth of traffic.  And he muttered something about me not keeping the faith, and then took me up on that bet.  So now we’re going to do it live.  In the next couple of weeks we are going to do a live broadcast of a load test, pushing Adhearsion to scale on both Asterisk and PRISM.  We are going to see just how “webscale” it is, and we’re going to be streaming the event live on Ustream so you all can join in the fun.  The loser (hopefully me) will be well and truly prepared to take your jeers and fork over the cash.  Look for an announcement soon for where and when.  It’s about as geeky fun as telephony gets.  I hope you’ll come join us.

In the meantime, go check out Adhearsion 2!