The SMS Gateway

One gateway type deserving special mention is the SMS gateway. SMS is used to send text messages between devices (usually phones and PDAs), and can also be used to send messages between applications and devices. Creating SMS applications requires:

• Access to the SMS world.

• An SMS account.

• Devices that can send and receive SMS messages.

• Application code that can interact with SMS.

To deploy a production SMS application you will need SMS access and an SMS account. But for development, ColdFusion comes with everything you need:

• An SMS server that simulates the SMS world on your server, allowing messages to be sent back and forth between applications and "devices".

• An SMS gateway that can connect ColdFusion to the SMS world.

• A preconfigured gateway instance connected to the local SMS server.

• A Java applet device emulator that can be used to simulate one or more devices (communicating with each other and with ColdFusion code).

The techniques used to send and receive SMS messages are no different from what was described previously. All that will differ is the gateway instance name and the CFEvent contents.