It's been a bit crazy over the past two weeks. We presented an Alpha version of our project today. The project is a system which can be used to run and manage an entire radio station. The system includes management of the station's music store, broadcasting, inbound and outbound communication via SMS and email, show recording and a portal. The presentation went well with no bugs appearing and no crashes, which is always great! After the presentation, the comment was made that we had gone beyond the basic Alpha system requirements which to me means that we impressed!
The main system was built in C# and the SMS Gateway in Java. All the different components communicate via web services which makes our life a whole lot more challenging. If we had to split up all the components and run them on different machines, it would take 6 machines to run everything - So needless to say, it's fairly complex! But as was said in the previous post - Visual Studio is a great tool which makes your life pretty easy in building these. But then again, I found that Netbeans 6 was also great in this regard - building a service to get C# and Java talking was really easy!
In the previous post I said that I was going to try out this new library I found for SMS'ing... Well, it didn't work. I eventually resorted, reverting back to the original SMSlib. (SMSlib.org) But I did manage to get a new interface going to BulkSMS. (BulkSMS) They support a basic HTTP interface to send SMS's and they give code samples in various languages which can just be copied and pasted. It all works really simply and they give you 5 free SMS's upon registration. Receiving SMS's via BulkSMS is another story though. It costs a fair bit of money to set up some incoming rules - I didn't look too far into it though.
It's been a while - Much has happened. Well, I've been doing a bit of work in C# . Ughh.... I hate it. Ok, maybe it's a bit too strong, but I can honestly say there are things I don't like about C# (Visual Studio is pretty dam good though.) Well this is maybe for another blog entry.
I'm trying to complete my SMS gateway but I'm stuck with the fact that the library that I was going to use is incompatible with my Samsung phone, and I'm really not going to download the AT command spec for my phone and fix it. So I've found another open source library at SourceForge and will give it a go now. Will post back later on how that goes.
