Want to play with building Twitter apps on Tropo? Source code for 5 simple apps

blog.tropo.com

14 points·danyork··6 comments

So tropo uses voxeo to do its phone/voice/sms related stuff? Kind of like a competitor to twilio?

Yes. Looks like Tropo focuses more on language APIs, twilio seems to be pushing it's XML/JSON over HTTP, though it also has some langauage APIs that wrap the web stuff.

Though keep in mind, Voxeo's been around for a while. It's probably more accurate to say Twilio is a competitor to them.

There are two ways you can write Tropo apps:

1) Tropo Scripting, where the app is hosted in the Tropo cloud (similar how Google App Engine works) and is written in PHP, python, Ruby, Groovy or JavaScript; or

2) Tropo WebAPI where you run the app on your server and communicate with Tropo via a RESTful API using JSON. The app can obviously be written in any language you want since it's on your server and can use all available libraries. To help developers get started with the WebAPI, we've made available libraries for Ruby, PHP, python, C# and Node.js. (Available at http://github.com/tropo )

And yes, Voxeo has been around since 1999 and is the largest hosting provider in the VoiceXML/CCXML space.

Thanks for the clarification. You work with Tropo or Voxeo?

I actually had a (brief) twitter conversation with the CEO of Voxeo asking about standardizations. I like CCXML OK but really, it doesn't serve the same need as Tropo/Twilio. I'd like to see a more 'push' oriented standard get developed.

Actually, I just looked, you responded on twitter too. So, any chance of trying to get a 'push' style API standardized? :)

Yes, Tropo is a service of Voxeo and runs on Voxeo's global carrier-grade infrastructure.

Though they are similar, Tropo offers more features, more stable support and scales better than Twilio. http://pin13.net/1qJ

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