Earlier this week, CTO John Riordan and Software Engineer Will Mitchell attended the NYC Telephony Hackers Meetup to demonstrate and discuss OnSIP’s three APIs.
Monday night John Riordan and I went to the Rain Agency, located in NYC, to attend the Telephony Hackers Meetup. This was the third of the monthly meetups and my first time attending. Organizer Doug Crescenzi did a great job with the event, attracting about 15 people to discuss telephony APIs and share in some pizza and beer.
The meetup kicked off with some introductions; attendees were a mix of employees at VoIP companies, telephony moonlighters, and just people genuinely curious about what’s out there. After the intros, Adam Kalsey, Product Manager at Voxeo Labs, called in from Sacramento via Skype to present a description of Phono (originally Tim Panton was supposed to be Skyping in but had fallen under the weather). Phono is a jQuery plugin from Voxeo Labs that puts a soft phone into the browser, similar to OnSIP’s Osprey.js. While the presentation was excellent, Skype and a poor wireless connection proved troublesome. After abandoning screen sharing and only sending audio one direction, we managed to scrape by.
I followed Adam with a demonstration and discussion of OnSIP’s 3 APIs: our web services API for configuring your PBX, our XMPP API for real time OnSIP data, and our new Osprey.JS, which puts the power of the Jitsi soft phone into any browser. John also jumped in at key points to help field questions and talk more about OnSIP and the origin of our APIs.
The presentation was oriented very much towards demonstrations. I was determined to show the power of our APIs, so I set myself a goal: to start from scratch and configure users, add voicemail boxes, and start making calls, all from a Javascript console. After signing up for an account at the beginning of the presentation, I loaded up our three JavaScript libraries for the APIs and was ready to go.
Was it a success? I’d say so. In under half an hour, I was making calls between two new users and leaving voicemail messages to boot. This left ample time to display what we’ve made with our APIs - admin.onsip.com and my.onsip.com. While there wasn’t time to cover everything our APIs can do (it’s a lot!), I tried to leave the meetup attendees with a sense of each one.
The best part of the evening was seeing so many people interested in not only telephony, but how new technology is making it easier to build applications that include voice calling. Adam’s Phono talk included a nice introduction to WebRTC and its future role in voice over the web, and before the presentations even started, there was good discussion about what role WebRTC plays alongside SIP and other existing VoIP technology.
