We’re really happy to be partnering on with Broadsoft as part of their developer’s and extended marketplace. This is the first part of three posts we’ll be doing on the work we’ve been doing with their platform. In this first part, we’ll be talking about the ruby gem we’ve written to be the basis for our work.

Before we get there, of all the carrier platform choices we could make, it was clear that Broadsoft was the one worthy of our attention. First, a few weeks ago, they announced the BroadSoft Xtended program targeted to “Personalize Voice Communications Technologies Through Web 2.0 Integrated Applications.” Secondly, I received repeated assurances that they had a commitment to an open marketplace and an open approach to supporting their developers. Third, and I can give you my assurance of this as an ex-CTO of their competitor, Netcentrex, Broadsoft is winning in the marketplace. Directly from their site, “BroadSoft provides VoIP applications to 7 of the top 10 and 13 of the top 25 largest carriers worldwide, as measured by recent annual revenue, including Korea Telecom, KPN, SingTel, Sprint, Telefonica de Espana, Telstra, Deutsche Telecom’s T-Systems, and Verizon. To date, our platform has been deployed in the most IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) networks worldwide.” When Scott Wharton told me about his program, I couldn’t sign on fast enough.

Our first job was to get a development environment that we could deal with. In the medium term, Broadsoft engineering is planning a complete REST interface to the platform. Until then, they have an XML based interface called “CAP2″. Nothing wrong with that from a carrier perspective, but if you haven’t noticed, I’m a Web 2.0 guy now. (Out damn spot). So, we’ve written a ruby gem to interface our software to a Broadsoft switch. We’ve received permission from Ruby Forge, and we’re posting it up there today. Using this gem, it’s drop dead easy to install, configure and manage a user account.

First, installation is simple. From any ruby development machine with gems installed, say :

gem install broadsoft

That’s it. You’re ready to go. If you want to play around with it, jump into the interactive ruby browser (irb), and have at it. First, include gems and the broadsoft gem:

irb(main):001:0> require ‘rubygems’
=> true
irb(main):002:0> require ‘broadsoft’
=> true

then all you need to do is login.

bs = Broadworks.new(“example.broadsoft.com”, “2208″, “demo@broadsoft.com”, “youdontcare”)

=> #<Broadworks:0×11bc6b8 @user_uid=”270384658″, @port=”2208″, @t=#<TCPSocket:0×11bc604>, @host=”example.broadsoft.com”, @password=”youdontcare”, @logger=#<Logger:0×11bc67c @logdev=#<Logger::LogDevice:0×11bc618 @shift_age=nil, @filename=nil, @mutex=#<Logger::LogDevice::LogDeviceMutex:0×11bc5f0 @mon_waiting_queue=[], @mon_entering_queue=[], @mon_count=0, @mon_owner=nil>, @dev=#<IO:0×2e7d4>, @shift_size=nil>, @formatter=nil, @default_formatter=#<Logger::Formatter:0×11bc654 @datetime_format=nil>, @level=2, @progname=nil>, @call_client=”demo@broadsoft.com”>

that’s it. Your’e ready to go. Want to make your phone call somebody? Eeeeasy.

bs.dial “15088154321″

We also implemented answer, hold and release. (Still have some of the more exotic park and conferencing stuff to implement; we’ll see who actually cares about those.) Call notifications? Eeeeasy too, and in fine Ruby fashion:

bs.assign_call_function { |info|

# your code goes here.
}

As happens in ruby, info is an object containing all of the call variables we need. In our business intelligence application, we use these callbacks to populate a database so we can use it to drive our user interface from a ruby on rails application. Here’s what we actually did:

# Create your AR class
class Call < ActiveRecord::Base
end

bs.assign_call_function { |info|
# We need to put this information into the database. Let’s try that, shall we?

c = Call.find_by_callid(info["callId"])
if c.nil?
c = Call.new
c.user = info["user"][0] unless info["user"].nil?
c.remote_country_code = info["remoteCountryCode"][0] unless info["remoteCountryCode"].nil?
c.personality = info["personality"][0] unless info["personality"].nil?
c.callid = info["callId"]
c.calltype = info["callType"][0] unless info["callType"].nil?
c.release_cause = info["releaseCause"][0] unless info["releaseCause"].nil?
c.remote_number = info["remoteNumber"][0] unless info["remoteNumber"].nil?
c.appearance = info["appearance"][0] unless info["appearance"].nil?
c.extTrackingid = info["extTrackingId"]
c.remote_name = info["remoteName"][0] unless info["remoteName"].nil?
c.state = info["state"][0] unless info["state"].nil?
c.save
else
case info["state"][0]
when “5″
c.destroy
else
c.state = info["state"][0]
c.save
end
end
}

And that’s pretty much it. In the next two posts, we’ll explain how you can use this gem to implement a business intelligence mashup using 37 signal’s Highrise product, and then we’ll show you how we did a quick and simple click to call on the browser using this gem, ruby on rails and a greasemonkey script.