Time to dust off the blog.
Last week I had the privilege once again of attending Astricon, this time in Atlanta. It was the biggest Astricon yet, showing that Asterisk is continuing to gain users and momentum. As a finale to the show, Digium released Asterisk 11, the latest long-term support (LTS) version. Asterisk 11 includes WebRTC support, ICE/STUN/TURN for NAT traversal, new encryption methods and a reworked Jingle/Google Talk/Google Voice driver set (now called chan_motif).
Digium was heavily promoting their IP phone hardware, giving away D40 sets as quickly as other vendors at the show gave away T-shirts and pens. The phones are solid and feature-full, akin to current models of Polycom and Cisco-Linksys. When integrated with Asterisk or Switchvox, provisioning is incredibly simple, taking advantage of mDNS (Bonjour) for discovery and configuration.
Speaking of Switchvox, I got my first real look at the user interface and slick API that are part of Digium’s SMB turn-key solution. If I just wanted to plunk down some money and get a sophisticated, polished and powerful PBX for a small or medium business, I’d buy it.
I attended a session on controlling Asterisk with HTML5 and Node.js, and another on the Adhearsion platform for controlling Asterisk. Both sessions were inspiring, but I know neither Javascript (for HTML5/Node programming) nor Ruby (for Adhearsion). The only question in my mind is which of these I should learn first.
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