Building the Realtime User Experience

Sending and Receiving the Messages

As it exists, the application we’ve built is fairly full-featured—except for the caveat that it doesn’t actually do anything at all. We’ve built a lot of code that acts as a framework for the functionality that we still need to add. Without the ability to actually send and receive SMS messages, this application isn’t very useful. So let’s set up this application to interact with a couple of the more popular services in the SMS API service space.

TextMarks

Textmarks is a service that provides several different bits of functionality related to sending SMS messages. One of its core services is the ability to send and receive SMS messages via a simple HTTP-based API. The most basic service is also free, provided that you’re willing to put up with advertisements attached to the end of each message. In this case you’re given 120 characters to work with, and the rest may be used for an advertisement from a third-party company. You can pay for different levels of service that will allow you to remove this advertisement, but the free version is perfect for our purposes.

Reserving a keyword

To get started with this service, you must sign up for your keyword and configure your settings. Go to the TextMarks website and reserve a keyword to use for your application. You should see a form that looks like Figure 8-4.

Figure 8-4. Reserving a keyword with the TextMarks ...