Pharo messaging

Hi,

Lots of message apps in use today (WhatsApp, Telegram, ...) on phones and mobile
devices. There is "WhatsAPI" [1] - but my understanding is that it was closed for
legal/security reasons. There are other solutions like Telegram that also have an API [2].

What options do we have in Pharo these days:

 - to send messages from Pharo to a phone
 - receive messages from an app to control a Pharo image remotely
   from a phone or communicate

Thanks
T.

[1] https://github.com/venomous0x/WhatsAPI
[2] https://core.telegram.org/

Torsten Bergmann <[hidden email]> writes:

XMPP (jabber) is a standardized protocol with free open-source
implementations.

--
Damien Cassou
http://damiencassou.seasidehosting.st

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another without
losing enthusiasm." --Winston Churchill

2015-10-13 8:53 GMT-03:00 Torsten Bergmann <[hidden email]>:
For a prospect we had some months ago I played with Twilio
(https://www.twilio.com/).
We had to send SMSs and make calls with "options".

I performed a few tests using its REST interface with Curl, and it is
pretty straightforward. It wouldn't be hard to implement a REST client
directly in Pharo, as we already have for services like Mandrill.


Regards!

Esteban A. Maringolo

You could use the Tropo.com libaray here: http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~pdebruic/Tropo

Or the Twilio.com library here: https://github.com/newapplesho/twilio-smalltalk

both let you call phones (& answer them) and have Pharo act like an interactive voice response system reading text to the call recipient and listening for verbal or key press responses.  Those libraries also send SMS messages.

Norbert Hartl had a system in place to send push notifications but that may have been in conjunction with his own app rather than a 3rd party platform like urban airship

You need to use a combination of push/pull messaging. If you like to do a chat app then XMPP might be useful for this. But that only works when an app is active (foreground) on a phone. For push messaging you need to use a service that provides it. We have our own push message service running in order to do that. An alternative would be urban airship.

> - receive messages from an app to control a Pharo image remotely
>   from a phone or communicate
>
I'm not sure what you mean by saying "receiving messages". You can have a pharo image installed on a server and a app could use a HTTP interface. Or did you have something special in mind?

If time wouldn't be such a sparse resource we could provide a solution to this. We are building most of the pieces to handle device and image management, push services and authentication. If time permits we might build a service where apps and images register themselves and allow each of the entities contact the others available.

Norbert

> Thanks
> T.
>
> [1] https://github.com/venomous0x/WhatsAPI
> [2] https://core.telegram.org/
>