Carnets de bord

AT&T released last week at CES a new API platform that exposes a number of Network APIs:

• SMS/MMS
• Location
• Device Capability
• In-App Payment
• WAP Push
• ...

The APIs implements OAuth 2.0 and capture user consent wherever applicable. I think the in-app payment (that goes directly to thesubscriber's bill) is a game changer for mobile applications, in particular Web  based mobile apps.

The APIs come with an SDK and some code samples.

In order to use these APIs, you need to join the developer program and create a developer account.

You would then create an "application" which basically gives an application id, a shared secret and a short code (yes ! your own short code). These credentials are used to get an access token (See figure below).

If you use the Java SDK (there are others available: PHP, Ruby...), all you have to do is to insert these values in the conf/att-api.properties file and build the project with Eclipse or Ant directly.

Once it is built, you just start the server by executing run.sh and you deploy the Sencha client application in your web server. The API server aquires access tokens automatically.

Here is how I deployed my server:

SDK -> /var/www/att/server -> sh run.sh

Sample app -> /var/www/client -> open http://www.yourdomain.com/client/examples/sms

If you want to change the location of the application, just update the ResourceBase value in the com.sencha.jetty.EmbeddedServer class. In my case, it was set to  webapp.setResourceBase("../../client");

That's it ! And if you wonder, with your very own shortcode, you can also receive SMS too.

I have a few promo codes from AT&T that give you free access to the platform for one year.