Very cool! Asterisk, the open source telephony server, has a decidedly ugly configuration and programming language. Evan showed how this is encapsulated by the by now ancient (1 year old) RAGI, and what improvements are to be expected with RAI (Ruby Asterisk Integration). This allows for development of telephony applications that are tightly integrated with a Rails app — including the ability to share a session between phone and web! This is something definitely worth trying out.

Here is Evan’s blog, the slides seem to be up as well.