The NEW Esendex API offers a powerful, yet simple, interface to send and receive messages; manage contacts and contact groups; and your accounts. We’ve built it on simple and established standards following ‘REST’ (REpresentational State Transfer) principles based on HTTP and using XML. XML is widely implemented in programming languages and reduces the need for additional libraries which can be necessary, for instance, with SOAP services.

You will be familiar with the ‘REST’ style as it is the basis of the way the Internet works in general. A client makes a request on a resource to perform an operation and gets a response. For example, you are viewing this web page because your web browser formed an HTTP GET request for this page (resource) and the server returned you a HTML representation of the web page.

Instead of Services with a list of commands, the Esendex API provides a set of resources that you can interact with. These resources are identified by different URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers). Resources represent the different types of data for Esendex. E.g. message headers, contacts, contact groups etc.

To perform an operation on these resources, you simply create an authenticated HTTP Request with an appropriate HTTP Method. The HTTP Method verbs of GET, POST, PUT and DELETE open up opportunities to retrieve, create, update and remove resources respectively.

One of the key advantages of the Esendex API is that you can start exploring the data you can get from it straight away using only your web browser. For example, if you navigate to http://api.esendex.com/v1.0/inbox/messages(and provide your Esendex username and password when prompted by your browser), you will get a paged XML response of your inbox messages.

There’s comprehensive documentation for the Esendex API within the developer area of our website which will explain all of the resources you can interact with in detail.

Our confidence in the reliability and flexibility in our new API is such that our Web to SMS application front-end, “Echo”, is based entirely upon the Esendex API.

The comments appearing on the web page are short snippets of Olympics news but also includes feedback to customer messages sent in via an SMS Shortcode they have set up. The style of short posts written in a relaxed and often fun tone have been encouraging customers to text in with their thoughts and discussion points.

In one post this lunchtime, Ben Dirs who is writing on the page today said:

“1415: Lots of people moaning about the medals table, mainly because Germany are shown above GB despite having exactly the same medal tally. Seriously, I worry about you lot sometimes, haven’t you got some hoovering to do?”

This two-way communication with SMS being used as a way to collect direct feedback and the results being integrated live via a web page is a great example of how SMS can help you build Web 2.0 community style experiences.