Table of Contents
What is Twilio and what do they offer developers
From a developer’s perspective, Twilio is literally a developer API (application programming interface). Using Twilio, developers can create applications that let users send and receive text messages, make phone calls, and do virtually anything else using SMS. As stated earlier, Twilio doesn’t produce or own the phones that users use to send/receive texts. Rather, it offers an API that developers utilize to build text-messaging applications in a number of different environments. The API can be used to make calls to a cloud-based service like Twilio’s cloud platform or Integration Platform, or a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) system like Twilio’s Robust Audio Messaging API (RAMA). In either case, Twilio is the API that developers use.
How to get started with Twilio development
When you create a Twilio account, you first need to create a developer profile. This involves registering an email address and creating a password for your account. You’ll also need to create a fully-unique phone number that’s associated with this account. (This is used by your application to send and receive text messages from users.)
After creating the developer profile, you’ll be able to sign in with your developer credentials. From here, you can install the Twilio Plugin for Eclipse and start writing code to build your Twilio-powered application.
This guide assumes that you have already created a developer account and verified your account credentials (i.e., login name and password). If you need to create an account or register a phone number, please follow this link.
How to get started?
1. Download and Install the Twilio Plugin
The first step towards building your application is to download and install the Twilio Plugin for Eclipse. You’ll need to have Eclipse installed to use the plugin, but that’s only because we’re using a customized build of the Java Development Kit (JDK) from Eclipse.
Some common use cases for Twilio
When you first look at the Twilio documentation, you’ll probably notice that there are a number of different use cases that leverage their developer API to handle text messages and phone calls. In the world of startups and entrepreneurs, Twilio is used in both B2B and B2C applications. The following are a few of the most common use cases for Twilio:
Using Twilio for B2B or B2C customers.
Calling a number to leave a voicemail for another Twilio phone number.
Enabling SMS Text Messaging (SMS) to get real-time customer support from your customers and prospects.
Enabling SMS Messaging to collect responses to marketing campaigns.
Voting.
Placing calls to business partners.
Billing customers and collecting payments for services.
Asking the public for feedback via SMS or voice messages.
Sending notifications or alerts for events or for the general public.
Resources for further learning about Twilio development
If you’re interested in learning more about Twilio, I would highly recommend signing up for a developer account and using their API to build your own SMS-based applications. The documentation that they have available is well written and quite thorough, so you shouldn’t have any difficulty getting started. In addition, Google has recently started supporting Twilio as an application platform, which means that you can now gain access to SMS-based applications using Google’s tools.
If you’re interested in going beyond SMS and want to explore some of the other available Twilio services, you might be interested in learning more about web chat apps. Check out the tutorial located at http://www.twilio.com/docs/webchat or keep an eye on their blog for further developments: http://blog.twilio.com/.
I hope that you found this resource to be helpful! If you would like to see more articles like this, or if you would like to see different topics covered, let me know in the comments section below.
Thanks for reading.
– Brian Massey
Reading list for learning about Twilio:
Twilio Official Documentation: http://www.twilio.com/docs/index
Google App Engine support for Twilio: https://code.google.com/apis/android/googleappengine/docs/twilio.html
Twilio Blog: http://blog.twilio.com
Google App Engine support for Twilio: https://code.google.com/apis/android/googleappengine/docs/twilio.html #2 Revvo New Member Rep Posts
Revvo is online now Join Date: Jun 2011 Location: Portugal Posts: 18 Revvo is online now
