What is an SMS Gateway API?

What is an SMS Gateway API?

What is an SMS Gateway API?

Not many people are truly familiar with SMS gateway APIs, a popular up-and-coming technology. An SMS gateway is a server used to send and receive SMS messages. API to SMS gateways facilitate the sending and receiving of information from these servers; they allow you to write software or a website that can interact with it. As the role of mobile phones in our society continues to grow, it becomes necessary for companies to be able to contact their customers and provide SMS-driven information and services. This is where the SMS gateway API comes in, and for the ambitious software developer, learning the technology behind them is a must.

The SMS protocol is widely used today in modern handsets. The idea originated in the field of radiotelegraphy in pagers, and standardised phone protocols were already in place for this kind of exchange. The original SMS messages had standards defined in 1985, and were capable of sending up to 160 characters. The technology has expanded to include mobile technologies operating all over the world, including ANSI and CDMA networks, amongst others.

Today, most SMS messages are sent between mobile phones. Most mobile phone services support SMS messaging, and for mobile phone owners it is taken as a given. SMS messages are sent along with the pings checking for mobile phone service, and are therefore extremely profitable; they use very little bandwidth, and only use bandwidth that will be used either way.

An SMS gateway API is used for a number of purposes. Chief among these is web application integration; any business that wants to validate their service by phone, send update messages, or simply stay in touch with their users automatically, needs SMS APIs. There are a number of services you can use for this, most of them extremely affordable. There are even free services that send your message along with a short advertisement.

The great thing about SMS APIs from a developer's perspective is that they can be used from any platform, with overhead. It doesn't matter what language you use, what libraries you have, what operating system you're using, or where your server is; an API can be used by any language that allows packets to be sent and received over the web, and works with the easy and common HTTP protocol. Return data formats are commonly JSON or XML, both widely accepted data types with libraries to parse them in PHP, Java, C#, Python, and nearly any other language you can think of. All you need to include in your URL request is an API key, which can be obtained from the company running the API.

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