Nice to see Dan York here - I remember him from Linuxcare days...
This article would be a lot more interesting if it were actually Erlang interacting with an SMS sending device and handling clients via the web or something like that. The code is really just an HTTP request with some json, which in the grand scheme of things is not terribly interesting.
Hey, David, great to see you here as well! (And yes, I remember those Linuxcare days well...)
So "interesting" is obviously a matter of perspective, but in this case the simplicity is really the point - this is all you need to do in Erlang to send and receive SMS messages. http://tropo.com acts as the sending device and the client device to interact with the SMS networks. You simply communicate with Tropo using JSON over HTTP.
Personally, I find apps like this interesting... but others obviously may not.
Zhao Lu has written a couple of other posts recently creating similar apps in Go and Scala.
P.S. In full disclosure, Tropo is a cloud communications service of my employer, Voxeo, but even if it weren't, I still would've submitted the link because I think the article is cool :-)
The comparison really comes down to "what do you need to do to send json over http in various languages". The fact that the service at the other end happens to send sms's, as opposed to causing monkeys to fly out someone's nose is sort of incidental. That said, Tropo does look pretty cool, and a whole lot more useful than monkey-nose web services.
davidw, i wrote 3 blogs on using different languages and web frameworks to send sms. for me, it's a learning experience. more importantly, it's demonstrate how different languages/web frameworks can interact with Tropo, which in the grand scheme of things (telco 2.0), is interesting. a lot of great work Tropo and some other companies (including telcos like Orange, Telefonica) is to enable web developer to access their network and adding sms and call functions easily to their web sites. In a way, it makes the telco cloud more open.
This article would be a lot more interesting if it were actually Erlang interacting with an SMS sending device and handling clients via the web or something like that. The code is really just an HTTP request with some json, which in the grand scheme of things is not terribly interesting.