There are a few technical interview strategies everyone knows: communicate your thoughts, give yourself time to think, and keep calm. Absent among these, of course, is coming up entirely blank for a question. So when in the interview for an engineering internship my manager asked, “What experience do you have with distributed systems?” I took a deep breath and, cringing a little, replied, “None, yet. But I’m smart and I learn fast, and I’m interested to learn by working in one.” This was true. I’d been curious about the subject for a while, and figuring it wouldn’t hurt to try, had worked up the courage to apply to a role for which I didn’t hit every “ideal qualification” checkbox. (Take that, tech gender gap!) And to my surprise and relief, I moved forward – all the way to San Francisco, to a spot on Twilio’s ...

Earlier this year Troy Hunt released version 2 of his popular Pwned Passwords API service. The new version comes with even more compromised passwords and a more secure way to query the password API that doesn’t require sending plain text passwords over the network.

The API update comes at a good time. When NIST updated its password guidelines in 2016, it included a new recommendation to check “memorized secret verifiers”, or passwords, against known data breaches:

When processing requests to establish and change memorized secrets, verifiers SHALL compare the prospective secrets against a list that contains values known to be commonly-used, expected, or compromised. For example, the list MAY include, but is not limited to passwords obtained from previous breach corpuses.

Since the API release, the community has created API wrappers in many of our favorite programming languages. In this post, I round up the libraries in 7 languages ...

The need for real-time chat can’t be overemphasized. Real-time communication with your users increases customer satisfaction, and as a result, makes your business more credible.

In this article, I’ll walk you through setting up a Java Struts 2 application. Then we’ll add real-time chat to the application by leveraging Twilio Programmable Chat.

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have built an application similar to this:

Software Requirements

The following are used in this post:

• Java SDK– Download and install the  Java SDK from Oracle’s site, if you don’t have it already. (I’m using version 9.0.1)
• Eclipse IDE – Download and install Eclipse from their website. (I’m using Oxygen.1a Release (4.7.1a))
• JavaScript (jQuery)
• Maven (The most recent version of Eclipse includes Maven already)

Step 1: Set up Twilio Programmable Chat

First, we need to set up Twilio Chat ...

It seems like there’s a RESTful API for everything these days. From payments to booking tables, from notifications to spinning up virtual machines, you can do almost anything with a simple HTTP interaction.

If you’re building a service of your own, you’ll often want to be able to use it on multiple platforms at once. Following time-tested OOD (object oriented design) principles makes your code more resilient and more easily extended.

In this post, we examine one particular design approach called SOLID (it’s an acronym). We put it to practical use in writing a service that’s a Slack integration and then extending it for use with Twilio.

The service sends you a random Magic the Gathering card. If you’d like to see it in action right away, you can text the word magic to: 1-929-236-9306 (U.S. and Canada only – you’ll get an ...

Twilio Lookup is a simple REST API  for obtaining information about a phone number. Lookup can determine if a number exists, its type (landline, mobile, VoIP), and its carrier (Verizon, Sprint, etc) association. Lookup can also check if a number is able to receive text messages as well as format numbers into a standard format.

Let’s validate phone numbers using the Twilio Java library and the Lookup API and make the code easy to port into your existing Java applications. This post will be directed towards macOS and Linux users, as some of the commands will not work for Windows users.

If you just want to see the finished code, see this Github repository.

Configuring Our Environment

Our code will use the latest version of Java 8 (1.8.0_121). You can download the latest version of the Java JDK from here. You can test your Java install and ...

Java web applications can easily dial and receive phone calls by combining the Spark web framework with the Twilio Voice API. Our example phone calls will say a snippet of text then play an MP3 file, but they can easily be modified to provide other useful actions like gathering user input from the number pad or creating conference calls.

Our Project Tools

Our Spark web app will use the Java 8 JDK and Apache Maven so make sure you have those tools installed. If you need to get Java 8 and Apache Maven installed on your Windows machine, check out this tutorial (you can skip over the GWT bits). We will also need the following tools throughout this walkthrough:

• Spark web framework for responding to HTTP requests
• Ngrok to create a localhost tunnel to our local development environment
• A free Twilio account to use Twilio Voice
• Twilio Java helper library ...

Do you want to get started developing Java web applications that use Google Web Toolkit (GWT)? This guide walks through how to install a Windows 10 development environment so you can start building your projects.

Tools We’ll Need

We’ll need to install and configure several tools for our development environment:

• Java 8 Java Development Kit (JDK)
• Apache Maven build and configuration tool
• Google Web Toolkit (GWT) web framework

Let’s get started by downloading and installing version 8 of the Java JDK.

Java 8 JDK

Head over to the Java 8 JDK downloads page in your web browser. Read and accept the licensing agreement then proceed with the download for the latest release of the Windows x64 Java SE Development Kit.

When the download completes, run the executable. Allow the installer to make changes to your system.
Move through the installer and when you reach the following screen ...

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of our next generation Java helper library.  Get ready to enjoy a whole new level of productivity.

The approach

Java is the second next generation helper library that we are releasing, after announcing the new PHP library last month. We’ve rebuilt it from the ground up based on your and your fellow Java developers’ feedback.

To learn more about our novel approach to make the helper-libraries more consistent, enable faster iteration, and improve the libraries by having a shared foundation across languages, check out our blog post that introduced the next generation Twilio Helper Libraries.

What’s new

The Twilio Java helper library has undergone significant changes from the previous version to make the new library easier and more intuitive to use.

The new library

• Simplifies the basics like initializing the object and imports.
• Improves network efficiency by introducing Actions ...

If you’re an Android developer chances are you’ve used SQLite for internal storage in your mobile apps and know how painful it is to set it up.

Realm is a cross-platform mobile database engine that aims to provide developers with a mobile-first engine, super powered with fluent interfaces and field annotations. Here’s an example of how easy it is to use:

Let’s look at how to build an application that stores your notes in a Realm database.

What You’ll Need

• Android Studio

There are no other requirements to complete this tutorial since all you need is Android Studio, though you could probably use any other IDE’s you prefer.

If you don’t feel like going through ...

Software developers have a love-hate relationship with security, especially when shipping their product is concerned. All too often security is bolted on at the last minute or not at all. End-to-end encryption is particularly difficult to properly build and integrate into an application.

Twilio is partnering with Virgil Security to make building end-to-end encrypted applications a breeze with Twilio IP Messaging and Virgil Crypto SDK and Key Management. Now every developer can build security into their Twilio apps without having to become a crypto expert themselves.

What is end-to-end encryption?

The Virgil Crypto SDK is used to encrypt the content of messages so that only the message originators and recipients have the ability to decrypt and read it. Virgil Key Management provides the message recipient’s public key. The SDK uses that public key to encrypt the message on the sender’s device before the message is sent. The result ...