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At Twilio, I maintain a blog dashboard that allows my colleagues and I to perform analysis on traffic, conversions, and other metrics for articles published on this blog. I have written in the past about some of the database benchmarking techniques I’ve implemented for this project, and this generated interesting discussions on Hacker News. Today I will be discussing a topic that is a lot less controversial.
The charts and reports generated by this dashboard combine data from several sources that include web traffic, blog article metadata, and user information. The latter comes from a large internal company database hosted in a Presto cluster.
Presto is an open-source distributed query engine for big data created by Facebook. It allows users to query many different data sources, such as Hadoop, Kafka, MySQL, MongoDB, and many more using its own SQL implementation. This effectively abstracts the developer from query language differences among …
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ElastiCache, also known as Amazon ElastiCache, is an Amazon Web Service (AWS) platform that provides an in-memory data store and cache service with compatibility support for Redis and Memcache. ElastiCache was built to inject speed into web applications by replacing disk-based data retrieval with a much faster in-memory alternative.
The whole purpose of caching data is to reduce server latency. To achieve this, an in-memory key-value pair is a great option due to its fast data retrieval. Let's imagine you are building an app that performs complex queries (such as multiple joins) to the database and some additional calculations on the server.
Unless the data is cached, the response from the server might be slow because of the multiple-join queries to a disk-based database, and the additional computation is done on the server. But, if the data is cached on the first retrieval (that is, fetching from the database …
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This is part 3 of the series of how to set up a working MySQL database to send SMS. Part 2 can be found under the tutorial requirements.
In this article, you will learn how to send an SMS with contents from a MySQL database.
Tutorial requirements
- Refer to this Twilio article to set up a MySQL database in Java Spring Boot.
- IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition for convenient and fast Java project development work. The community edition is sufficient for this tutorial.
- Java Development Kit (JDK) version 11.
- ngrok, also known as a handy utility to connect the development version of the Java application running on your system to a public URL that Twilio can connect to.
- MySQL is the database service you’ll use to store the employee data and access in your application through REST APIs. You can follow the guide for detailed steps to setup MySQL …
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Twilio’s Conversations API is described as “A single API for seamless conversational messaging”. That sounds really cool, but what kind of things can you actually build with the Conversations API?
Appfueled used Conversations API to build an engagement portal which resulted in 90% or greater retention rate, 46% more visits per year, and 15% spend for shops – what can it do for your business?
For starters, the Conversations API is a foundational component in Twilio’s offering and our industry leading software applications, Twilio Flex, and Twilio Frontline, are built on top of the Conversations API.
But the Conversations API can also be used to power your own multi-party or multi-channel applications. In this blog post, I will walk through configuring and deploying a digital channel Support and Messaging Application powered by Twilio Conversations.
Applications Architecture
Before we start building, let me show you the end result. Here …
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Nowadays, you may only associate group texting with friends or family—not as a tool for business. While that might have been accurate a few years ago, group texting for business is becoming more popular.
Texting is the prevailing form of communication with others, as 83.07% of the world population in 2022 now owns a smartphone. In fact, 48% of consumers say they prefer to communicate with businesses via text—more than email, apps, and direct mail combined. Best of all, 95% of text messages receive a response within 3 minutes of receipt—allowing businesses to reach targeted audiences sooner.
While SMS remains a powerful way to engage with your customers, sometimes you need to go beyond a 2-way communication method. What if you need to add a third person to the conversation? Or a fourth? Do you have to move the conversation to a messaging app like WhatsApp or Facebook …
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It is crucial for my mum to talk to her children every day. She loves talking with us, even if it’s just to listen to our voices.
Now that we are grown up, and we don’t live in the same house anymore, she continues her ritual. She takes time every evening to call us one by one with her phone. Sometimes it’s not easy for her, but she never misses a single day without doing it.
One day I asked her why she didn’t call us in a group like on Facebook or Zoom. She answered that it would take time for her to configure the internet, login into her account, etc. Then I started to imagine a way for her to reach all of her children with a single phone call.
If you face the same problem as my mum, or you just want to call multiple people with …
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Imagine that you want to give a fantastic dinner to your loved ones a great New Year's Eve dinner, but you want to keep it a surprise for as long as possible. So you decide to start sending them different SMS messages with a series of clues on different days to maintain the "mystique" of this surprise.
In this article, you will create a console application to send scheduled SMS messages with Twilio that are sent at a specific time/date.
Prerequisites
You will need the following for your development environment:
- a .NET IDE (Visual Studio, VS Code with C# plugin, JetBrains Rider, or any editor of your choice)
- .NET 6 SDK (earlier and newer versions should work too)
- A Twilio account (try out Twilio for free)
You can find the source code of this tutorial in this GitHub repository.
Configure Twilio
Get your …
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In this article, you will learn what sessions are and how to use them in your ASP.NET Core applications. Then, you will see the limitations of the default session and how to get beyond them by distributing your sessions.
Prerequisites
You will need the following to realize the project in this article:
- An OS that supports .NET (Windows/macOS/Linux)
- .NET 6.0 SDK (newer and older versions may work too)
- A code editor or IDE (Recommended: Visual Studio Code with the C# plugin, Visual Studio, or JetBrains Rider)
- A Redis database. Please refer to the Redis documentation according to your OS.
What are sessions?
The HTTP protocol is, by default, stateless. But sometimes it's essential to hold onto user data while users are browsing your website. This data can help to remember their recent actions. For example, on an e-commerce website, this data can help to store products …
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Writing code that "works" is the easy part. The real issue is writing code that "lasts". Whether it’s a change in team membership or a change in requirements, your code should be able to grow with the changes, by virtue of a well-defined architecture, and also identify breaking changes/unhandled edge cases that may arise due to said changes.
This article - the second in a series; aims to show you how testing will help you with the latter requirement. It will introduce testing in Golang and focus on unit testing a REST API. You will build on the first article to write tests for existing features, as well as employ test-driven development in the implementation of a new feature.
Prerequisites
To follow this tutorial, you will need the following:
Get started
If you already …
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The Twilio Content API and Content Editor power the next-generation of omni-channel messaging.
New Channels, New Challenges
New messaging channels like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Google’s Business Messages offer rich interactive experiences that boost engagement and delight customers. However, keeping up with the latest features across all channels can be challenging.
With new rich messaging features like buttons and lists, content rules and feature capabilities vary widely across channels. For developers integrating with channel providers directly this means embarking upon a time-intensive and complex development effort. To reach customers on the channel they prefer, content must be t …