Generally speaking, most cell phone carriers have an e-mail to SMS gateway that you can send a message to (say [email protected]). Most low to medium volume setups I've seen use something like that. Now, on the other hand, if you're really needing a true SMS gateway, chances are you'll just have to pay for it. I haven't seen anything (I'm in the US so it may be different elsewhere) that's reliable, not throttled pretty severely (like the 100/day limit another poster mentioned) and actually a reputable company, for free.
When sending SMS messages, the gateway provider you use can have different ways of doing it. The most "direct" way I know of is to form your own SMPP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_message_peer-to- peer_protocol) messages and dispatch those to the SMSC, but that gets down on the protocol level, which I personally don't like doing if I don't have to. I looked at this myself a few years ago, and in my situation, opted to use a simple XML-based web service that was provided by the SMSC. It was as simple as sending a properly formatted POST body to the SMSC itself, which was then responsible for forming the actual SMS message. I advocate using a similar approach (HTTP/web service based) if possible because it avoids the potential issues where you may have to learn the inner workings of SMPP and risk a potential mis- implementation that could break when SMSC software gets upgraded in the future. Using a vendor-supplied API is generally safer, as they will *usually* (if the vendor is worth anything at all) preserve backwards compatibility with their API across new versions. Abstraction layers are a good thing :) Additionally, at the time there didn't seem to be a lot of documentation for a Ruby-based SMPP library. I believe there was one available as a gem, but I don't remember its name off-hand. I remember looking at it and thinking, "wow, there's very little documentation or community behind this, so if I use it and run into a problem, I may have no access to help at all." I also seem to recall that it hadn't been updated in a while, but that may not be a big deal if they got the implementation right with their last release (it was a pure ruby library as I recall, no major dependencies). Bear in mind this was about two years ago, and things may have changed in the meantime. Hope this helps - good luck! On May 26, 6:34 am, Colin Law <[email protected]> wrote: > On 26 May 2011 10:12, Sathia S <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > >> hi, i am making a rails app which can send a message to mobile. > >> Can any body tell me that which gatway is providing the free service to > >> send a message? > >> and which gem in good to use? > > >>http://www.freesmsapi.com/ . > > > This is easy way to send sms using rails . it free . but i think there is > > limitation . only 100 sms per day > > Not to mention the fact that it only works with Indian phone numbers, > which may or may not be an issue for the OP. > > Colin -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.
