Back in June, Ian Webster built Call Congress. Call one number, enter your ZIP code, and you’re automatically connected with your representative. This tool enabled Americans to advocate for policy change using a powerful tool in their pocket — their phone. Ian narrowed the gap between citizens and elected officials because it seemed like the right thing to do and, as an engineer, he could… Read More
When someone texts your Twilio phone number, Twilio makes an HTTP request to your app. Details about the inbound message, such as what it said and the number it was sent from, are passed in the parameters of that request. In this post we’ll look at how to receive and parse that request in JavaScript using Node.js and Express. Then we’ll look at how to reply to the inbound SMS with… Read More
Tabs vs. spaces isn’t the only big discussion point in the world of programming. Another point of contention lies in statically-typed vs. dynamically-typed languages. TypeScript is Microsoft’s attempt to add a stronger type system to JavaScript while making both camps happy. Instead of wading into the debate, let’s look at three aspects of TypeScript: How to add TypeScript to an existing JavaScript project Improving your development experience and… Read More
Today we’re excited to introduce Sync, a purpose-built API for easily synchronizing state across devices and between users. State synchronization is a critical part of every application, but it’s a complex problem to solve in real-time, at scale. With Twilio Sync, developers can now spend their time building features for customers instead of building state synchronization infrastructure or customizing general purpose backend products. Sync is designed to… Read More
Twilio Lookup is a phonebook REST API that you can use to check whether a number exists, determine whether a phone can receive text messages, and retrieve carrier data associated with a number. Let’s write some code to validates phone numbers using the Twilio Node module. Getting started Before we dive into the code you’ll need to make sure you have: Node.js and npm installed A Twilio Account –… Read More
Component based UI libraries are a popular way of building modern applications. Angular and React are the heavyweights at the moment, but the humble browser and its native APIs are never far behind. Web Components were first introduced in 2011 and are the browsers’ attempt to bring componentisation to the web platform. There are a few libraries available for writing Web Components, most notably Google’s Polymer, but also X-Tag and Bosonic. To… Read More
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… Read More
With Segment Sources and Twilio, you can get a holistic view into your customers’ journey through your Twilio voice or SMS app. In just a few clicks you can sync your Twilio logs to a data warehouse for advanced analysis. Combine these logs with data generated by other customer touch points like CRM, helpdesk, payments, email and in-app data to give you a complete view of your customer experience…. Read More
Twilio Video simplifies building multi-person video chat applications and minimizes complicated WebRTC boilerplate. However having access to the underlying WebRTC objects can be advantageous and is sometimes necessary. The RTCPeerConnection is the main object behind a Twilio Video conversation, which you can access and use in just a couple of lines of code. Setting up a Twilio Video application If you already have a Twilio Video application built,… Read More