Our new SMS API – named the Esendex API – is now live. This new SMS API offers a powerful, yet simple, interface to send and receive SMS messages, manage contacts and contact groups, and your accounts.The Esendex API is built on simple and established standards following ‘REST’ (REpresentational State Transfer) principles based on HTTP and using XML. XML is widely implemented in programming languages and reduces the need for additional libraries – which can be necessary with SOAP services for example.The ‘REST’ style forms the basis of how the Internet works in general. A client makes a request on a page (resource) to perform an operation and gets a response back. E.g you are viewing this blog post because your web browser formed an HTTP GET request for this web page (resource) and the server returned you a HTML representation of the web page.Instead of providing services with a list of commands, our new SMS API provides a set of resources that you can interact with. These resources are identified by different URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers). Resources represent the different types of data for Esendex. E.g. contacts, message headers and contact groups.To perform an operation on these resources, create an authenticated HTTP Request with an appropriate HTTP Method. The HTTP Method verbs of GET, POST, PUT and DELETE open up opportunities to retrieve, create, update and remove resources respectively.
One of the key advantages of the Esendex API is that you can start exploring the data you can get from it straight away using only your web browser. Just navigate to http://api.esendex.com/v1.0/inbox/messages and provide your Esendex username and password when prompted by your browser. You will receive a paged XML response of your inbox messages.The Esendex API is fully documented, and available to download as a pdf file now from our Esendex API page. Our confidence in the reliability and flexibility in our new SMS API is such that our new Web SMS application, named “Echo”, is based entirely upon the Esendex API.
