The second half of today at Ruby Hoedown brought a great talk and a great key note.

Jay Phillips discussed Adhearsion, a Ruby Gem that he created that allows for the integration of VoIP into Ruby apps. Anhearsion currently works with Asterisk, an open source PBX (telephone system) from Digium. It was a great talk and useful for us, as we are working with a client to move their existing PHP interface to Asterisk to Ruby.

Bruce Tate did the day’s key note. A few of his main points that stuck with me are:

• Beauty takes you to the visionaries, but you have to take it to the masses
• There is a big chasm between visionaries and early adopters, and they like to come in groups

What gets you from the visionaries to the early adopters is solving the killer business problem. What is that you ask? Simple. Java development takes too long. In the same slide he also said that beauty alone is not sufficient. Was he referring to the speed issues that Ezra discussed in his Merb discussion (and I am reminded came up at Railsconf)? Perhaps. I’ll ask him for some clarification tomorrow and let you know what he says.

Funniest things I heard Bruce say today: √¢‚Ǩ≈ìShe can kill me with a sword. A business user that I want to keep happy,√¢‚Ǩ¬ù and √¢‚Ǩ≈ìJava didn’t start out as something that sucked, it became something that sucked.√¢‚Ǩ¬ù Classic.

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