
Adding Scheduling to Twilio with IronWorker - carimura
http://www.twilio.com/blog/2012/08/build-a-scheduled-reminder-app-with-twilio-and-ironworker.html
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jcampbell1
Since this was on the front page, I took the time to figure out what
IronWorker was all about. It looks to be cron, and memcached as a service,
which to me are not real pain points.

Twilio on the other hand is Asterisk, TTS, telephony gateways, and a bunch of
other telephony stuff as a service, which is a real pain point.

If I were to implement this app with neither iron.io nor twilio, it would be
easy, however using twilio would save me about 2 hours, and cost the same
money as a regular SMS gateway. Iron.io would require an additional several
hours, and cost additional money. In short, I see iron.io as a negative value
add.

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rubynerd
I'm an ex-intern of Iron.io (ply me with enough alcohol and I'll tell you
about it), and I can roughly explain IronWorker: background processing without
servers, with a scheduler on top.

I wouldn't call it a 'negative value add' because it means you don't have to
babysit a server somewhere, assuming you want to add scheduling onto a Twilio
action (call/SMS).

If you took Iron.io out of the equation, how would you schedule the Twilio
call? I assume you mean via cron, which is all well and good if you want
another server/script to babysit.

That said, I haven't used anything from Iron.io since I've left, and I've
written scripts which use a loop, sleep and two if statements to 'schedule' a
Twilio call.

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jcampbell1
Doesn't this require a server for a signup page? Once you have that, you get
cron for free.

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rubynerd
That Sinatra application can be run locally. From what I have gathered from
the article, the Sinatra application is a pretty form for putting your phone
number in, nothing more, Twilio calls Iron.io directly.

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suryaprakashrao
grate

