Page 270 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

• Ruby can execute a command inside backticks and return the result as a String.
We report the uptime here with it.

This example of course assumes that you have configured your application’s database
integration properly and have an Employee class mapping to a table with an exten
sion and full_name column.
Because Micromenus simply render varying responses over HTTP, a normal web
browser can make a request to the Micromenus’ server, too. For these more high-tech
endpoints, Micromenus render an attractive interface with Ajax loading, DHTML ef-
fects, and draggable windows.
In the interest of “adhering” people together, Micromenus exist as another option to
make your Adhearsion VoIP applications more robust.

Integrating with a Web Application

Though Adhearsion by design can integrate with virtually any application, including
PHP or Java Servlets, Ruby on Rails makes for a particularly powerful partner. Rails is
a web development framework getting a lot of press lately for all the right reasons. Its
developers use Ruby to its full potential, showing how meta-programming really does
eliminate unnecessary developer work. Rails’ remarkable code clarity and application
of the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle served as a strong inspiration to the in-
ception of Adhearsion as it exists today.

Starting with Adhearsion version 0.8.0, Adhearsion’s application directory drops in
place atop an existing Rails application, sharing data automatically. If you have needs
to develop a complex web interface to VoIP functionality, consider this deadly duo.

Using Java
Eyebrows around the world raised when Sun announced their hiring of the two core
developers of the JRuby interpreter project, Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, in
September 2006. JRuby is a Ruby interpreter written in Java instead of C. Because JRuby
can compile parts of a Ruby application to Java bytecode, JRuby is actually outper-
forming the C implementation of Ruby 1.8 in many different benchmarks and promises
to outperform Ruby 1.8 in all cases in the near future.
A Ruby application running in JRuby has the full benefit of not only Ruby libraries but
any Java library as well. Running Adhearsion in JRuby brings the dumbfounding as-
sortment of third-party Java libraries to PBX dialplan writing. If your corporate
environment requires tight integration with other Java technologies, embedding Ad-
hearsion in a J2EE stack may offer the flexibility needed.

242 | Chapter 10: Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) and Adhearsion