These days, I'd look at Twilio for drop dead easy and quick development. There are also gems for providers like clickatel. Of course, all the advice below is excellent and provides a really good backgrounder, but if developer time is at a premium and load is uncertain, Twilio isn't the cheapest per message, but it's very quick to get set up with.
Best Wishes, Peter On May 26, 2011, at 9:09 AM, Austin wrote: > 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. > -- 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.
