Chapter32.Integrating with SMS and IM

Chapter 32. Integrating with SMS and IM

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding IM 924

Defining IM gateways 926

Creating your first IM application 929

Creating interactive applications 935

Understanding SMS 938

Defining SMS gateways 941

Generating SMS messages 943

Responding to SMS messages 943

Extending your application even further 945

This chapter will expand on your knowledge of gateways and introduce you to two specific gateways, the SMS and IM gateways. While these gateways behave in very similar manner to other ColdFusion gateways, they do have some particularly interesting features that can help you build some exceptionally cool applications.

For instance, let's take the humble helpdesk every company has. They are there to help you out with computer problems. Typically every helpdesk is busy and every user thinks that their problem is the most important and should be fixed first.

Many helpdesks have a ticketing system that allows users to log an issue and track the status of the issue. The normal helpdesk workflow looks something like this: User logs issue, helpdesk agent receives issue, agent fixes issue, agent returns to desk, agent receives new issue. Unless the staff is a little more demanding. In that case they will log the issue and immediately walk around to the helpdesk area to find that they are all out and assume (incorrectly) that they are on an extended lunch break.

What if we could extend the reach of our helpdesk and allow helpdesk agents to 'see' the state of the helpdesk from the intranet, grab new tasks from their mobile phones, close tickets from an IM client and never have to go back to their desk between tasks? Now your Web application has broken out of the browser and is now available anywhere.

Over the course of this chapter we will build a very simple helpdesk application that does this exactly. This chapter assumes that you have an understanding of how gateways behave and that you have read chapter 31 on gateways.