A maintenance release update for NowSMS 2006 is now available for download.

This release contains numerous updates and enhancements for the NowSMS product.

Many of these updates and enhancements address specific project requirements of other NowSMS customers.

However, we want to draw attention to one of the more interesting new features, the ability to route received MMS messages directly to a PHP script.

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NowSMS has long been a popular tool for enabling rapid development of interactive SMS applications and services. Within the NowSMS product, we refer to this as 2-way SMS. Through the 2-way SMS facility, when NowSMS receives an SMS message, it can be configured to dispatch that message to a script running on an HTTP server, to a local executable program, or local script or batch file. This provides a simple way to get received messages into an application, so that the application can perform custom processing on the message. The application can generate a simple reply back to the received message, or perform more advanced application specific logic. The scripts that process the received message can be written in popular web server scripting languages such as PHP, ASP and Perl, making the development of these scripts a relatively simple process for web developers.

NowSMS also supports the ability to route received MMS messages to an application. However, historically, it has been considerably more difficult to develop an application to support receiving MMS messages, as compared to SMS. The primary reason for this increased level of complexity is that the content of an MMS message is considerably more complex than that of an SMS text message, as a single MMS message can contain multiple content objects of different types.

A new technique for 2-way MMS has been added, beginning with the October 30, 2006 (2006.10.30) release of NowSMS 2006. This technique uses HTTP POST to transmit the received MMS message content to a script file running on another web server. The HTTP POST format that is used is the same format that is used for "HTTP File Upload" (multipart/form- data) from an HTML form, with particular considerations to make it easier to process the HTTP POST using the PHP scripting language. This technique is not specific to PHP, and we hope to provide examples for other scripting languages in the future.

When an MMS message is received, NowSMS can be configured to perform an HTTP File Upload Post to a configurable URL. The format of the HTTP File Upload POST is similar to the Now SMS/MMS Proprietary URL Submission Format that is used by the "Send MMS Message" form in the NowSMS web interface.

To help demonstrate this new interface, we've developed an example PHP script which processes the components of a received MMS messages and logs them to a blog-like web page. The example script is available via links provided in the upper left hand corner of this newsletter.

Sincerely,