Forum OpenACS Q&A: Web-Based SMS Notifications Service Using OpenACS

Thesis Statement:
"The problem pursued in this thesis is to develop an efficient methodology (in the form of a service) to allow OpenACS application developers to easily integrate and embed SMS Notifications into their applications."

My plan is to incorporate SMS capabilities into the Notifications Package. Instead of relying on external gateways to send SMS, I will be using a GSM modem to send and receive SMS. Whether than writing the modem driver myself using TCL - it is much more managable if I use an Open Source SMS Server Tool Driver (http://www.isis.de/~s.frings/smstools/). This tool provides logging, black listing, various provider queues etc. This tool operates independently of OpenACS - all I need to do is to make a few modifications to the config file (e.g. modify their logging script to postgres instead of mySQL as provided). To send a SMS, all I need to do is create a file (in a given SMS format) and put it in a directory - the tool will look after the rest. All these have been tested by me and is working fine.

My current stage of the project is to try incorporate SMS service into the notifications package. This is where I have my difficulties. The Notifications Package is under documented - is difficult simply to use it - not to mention adding new capabilities to it. Just wondering whether anyone out there can give me a hand on how I go about using the notifications package to set up sms notifications? How should I go about structuring this? Do you think I should keep the SMS capabilities as separate as possible from the Notifications Package - i.e. just create a notifications type of SMS and then send by calling the SMS Package that I'm writing?

Once I can sort that out, within the SMS Package, I will provide a number of simple admin pages where the users can find out how many SMS notifications they have received, admin can add users to blacklist and it can use the info to generate bills and so on.

If all goes well, I'll provide simple step-by-step process for developers to incorporate the SMS Notifications Service to their applications. But I'll need quite a lot of help in using the notifications package.

Also, I've installed OpenACS 4.6.3 - not sure if the notifications package in there is the latest (i tried to install the package by itself and tried to use the admin pages - but doesn't seem to work) - do i need a newer version, if so, which one should i be getting?
Regards,

Jackson Chow

Simon Millward did something very similar while his company (OpenMSG) was alive.  But I guess this code may have gone away with OpenMSG too.

Try to dig the forums.  Simon did say what his new company is in his last post.

https://openacs.org/shared/community-member?user_id=8237

https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=105595

I will be personally interested with the code.  Please make it available.  It would be very useful.

Maybe it would be a good starting point for MMS :)