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 on 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.

Last Thursday we held our first ever Esendex Hack Day.  Our developers were taken off their day-to-day jobs and given just two days to create a fantastic new product from scratch. There were two rules to follow: to use the Esendex API to solve a consumer problem and to report back by 3pm Friday.  The impressive diverse range of new products that were created in such a short space of time proved how powerful and flexible our APIs are (and how clever our developers are of course…).

Alex, John and Darren build an SMS service based directions finder, called “GetMe2″.  Our Locations Based Services and Google Maps were untilized, the service enables customers to text a place that they want to get to (e.g. ‘New York’, ‘coffee shop’, etc) and get directions back through SMS.  This is great for the high percentage of people without a smartphone and those of us with smartphones who struggle to get 3G reception.

Neil and John identified that not every business has Outlook or Exchange.  They interfaced the Google calendar with the Esendex SMS API to create an appointment booking service. This service could be used to text appointment requests, updates and SMS confirmations to both the calandar owner and the customer.

Jonathan created a product call ‘Atlas’.  Car parking data was streamed to allow drivers to find out by SMS how many car parking spaces were free, in each of the districts car parks. Drivers could choose a district or even a specific car park to find out in real time where the best place to park is.

And Scott took the festive season as his inspiration  to create a Secret Santa Organizer ! It takes all the administration away and works totally anonymously – meaning you’ll never find out who bought you that horrible jumper…

The Hack Day was a brilliant success and shortly the team will be showcasing their work on their own blogs. We’re looking to run a similar event next year for the wider development community, so if you’d like to join in please get in touch.

The C# SMS SDK integration includes examples of some of the key Esendex features, including; Inbox, Contacts, Messaging and Sent Items. There have been associated unit tests carried out on these examples, in line with TDD (Test driven development) an approach used by the Esendex development team.

If you would like to start sending messages straight away, there’s comprehensive documentation for C# SMS SDK and also a quick start guide.

If you would like to try our C# SMS SDK please take a look at http://esendex.codeplex.com/releases. If you don’t have an account then please sign up for a free trial! – it would be great to hear what you think.