My 30 Day Project, An Overview

The application I am working on for this 30 day challenge is called SMSRelay Suite.

SMSRelay is designed to allow the sending of SMS TXT messages from your desktop computer. At the moment the program is designed to work with SMS Gateway provider, 2SMS. 2SMS provide desktop SMS clients free of charge as do several other independent developers. Where SMSRelay differs is that it is designed as a corporate SMS solution, with all messages being sent and then archived by a central relay, with a simple way of interfacing to it from almost any application.

The SMSrelay suite will comprise of three programs:

SMSRelay
SMSRelay sits on a server within the enterprise monitoring a shared directory. When messages are placed in this directory it parses them, sends them and then archives them.

ArtenSMS
ArtenSMS is a simple desktop client for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux that sits on the users workstation and creates the messages that are then picked up and sent via SMSRelay.

AppWithNoName
This application will be a cross platform application that will take as input a tab delimited or comma separated list of names and numbers and send a selected SMS TXT message to each number, a kind of SMS mailshot. Ideal for informing customers of something important or urgent.

The SMS message is created as a simple XML text file. This means that in addition to the client applications detailed above, it will be very straightforward for IT staff within the enterprise to generate SMS messages from existing legacy applications or even batch files, scripts etc. For example it would be easy to create an SMS message during a delivery note run which would advise the customer by SMS when their delivery was due. Another example would be creating an SMS message as part of a backup script, if something failed. In these and many other scenarios the advantage is that only a simple XML text file needs creating and saving in a shared directory. All the sending, error checking and archiving is done by SMSRelay.

So that’s the overview of my challenge. At the moment SMSRelay is nearly complete, bar a decision on how to do licensing. ArtenSMS is early Alpha and AppWithNoName (working name ‘Clint’) has not been started. In addition I need to do documentation, installers, website etc. etc. This is going to be an interesting month :-)

In my next post I will show some screenshots of SMSRelay and discuss the program in more detail.