Zillow Group's investment in the Follow Up Boss platform will further help teams and agents deliver great customer experiences, boost productivity and grow their businesses   SEATTLE, Nov. 1, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Zillow Group has entered into an agreement to acquire Follow Up Boss,

Zillow Group to acquire Follow Up Boss, an industry leader in customer relationship management

Twilio (TWLO) has received quite a bit of attention from Zacks.com users lately. Therefore, it is wise to be aware of the facts that can impact the stock's prospects.

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A new study from Juniper Research, the foremost experts in telecommunications markets, has forecast global retail spend via conversational commerce channels will increase to $43 billion by 2028, from $11.

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Dribbble is a talent showcase platform that’s used by millions of graphics designers and others to share and discover digital artwork. It says Objective’s ability to combine image search and understand metadata that’s often inconsistent or sparse meant that it consistently outperformed its own, internally developed search tools.

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The stock price of Twilio Inc (NYSE: TWLO) has surged by 1.38 when compared to previous closing price of 57.34, but the company has seen a -0.02% decline in its stock price over the last five trading sessions. Zacks Investment Research reported 2023-10-17 ...

Twilio Inc (TWLO) Shares Rise Despite Market Challenges

The Zacks Internet - Software industry, to which Twilio belongs, has gained 1.7% over this period. Now the key question is: Where could the stock be headed in the near term? While media releases or rumors about a substantial change in a company's business ...

Twilio Inc. (TWLO) is Attracting Investor Attention: Here is What You Should Know

Twilio Inc (Twilio) is a provider of cloud communications platforms that enable developers to build and manage applications without the need to create and maintain the underlying infrastructure. The company’s platform includes programmable communications ...

Company Profile - Twilio Inc

Risk Disclosure: Trading in financial instruments and/or cryptocurrencies involves high risks including the risk of losing some, or all, of your investment amount, and may not be suitable for all ...

Twilio Inc DRC (TWLO)

The Zacks Internet - Software industry, to which Twilio belongs, has gained 1.7% over this period. Now the key question is: Where could the stock be headed in the near term? While media releases ...

Twilio Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides a cloud communications platform that enables developers to build, scale, and operate communications within software applications in the United States and internationally. Its customer engagement platform provides a set of application programming interfaces that handle the higher level communication logic needed for nearly every type of customer engagement, as well as enable developers to embed voice, messaging, and video capabilities into their applications. The company was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Twilio Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides a cloud communications platform that enables developers to build, scale, and operate customer engagement within software applications in the United States and internationally. Its customer engagement platform provides a set of application programming interfaces that handle the higher-level communication logic needed for nearly every type of customer engagement, as well as enable developers to embed voice, messaging, video, and email capabilities into their applications. The company was incorporated in 2008 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

TWILIO INC

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues in several countries, causing notable modifications to occur in workplaces; organizations are grabbing on to artificial intelligence, IoT services and as-a-service (aaS) models to conform to the fast-emerging realities. Therefore, only an alternative approach of collaboration can stimulate the clattered productivity and effectiveness of the global workforce in an enterprise, as these changes are sure to have a lasting influence on future workplace practices. Enterprises are looking for a method of transferring employee dependence on physical hardware and allocating increased investment into the software sphere, this is where UCaaS is implemented. What Is Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)? UCaaS is an enterprise-focussed service dedicated to streamlining the transmission of communication through cloud-based services. Unified Communications as a Service offer organizations innovative features, integration potentialities and functionality that would not have been feasible with conventional communication systems. While “UC” stands for Unified Communications, the 'as a service' features of the technology implies that it can administer unified communications anywhere, at any time, over the cloud. UCaaS eradicates the necessity for expensive IT infrastructure and the support of a full IT team by implementing UC on the back-end which can be done by Cloud service providers. Before the cloud-integrated technologies, telecom service providers offered IP Centrex and Hosted communications services. These were practically similar to the current UCaaS capability, except for the fact that “virtualization” has determined that the distribution of unified communication as a service is so much more compelling. A few examples of prominent UCaaS providers include Twilio, Voxbone, 8x8 and Zoom Video Communications. How The COVID-19 Pandemic Is Accelerating Cloud Adoption The coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak is proffering a unique possibility where business administrators, globally, have to promptly enable their workforces to operate remotely for an extensive period. Consequently, enterprises are including remote work practices, where collaboration holds the solution to meet the expectations among the administration and employees. According to Future Market Insights, the Coronavirus pandemic is anticipated to expedite cloud adoption, not only as a technological adaptation but also as an operating model. Several large and medium enterprises all across the globe are acknowledging the boundaries of their current environments and struggling with the effect of the pandemic on their businesses. In response to the current scenario, UCaaS solution providers and companies are taking appropriate actions to satisfy consumer demand for cloud usage, due to the sudden shift to a remote-first workforce. Moreover, Unified communication as a service (UCaaS) market is expected to grow exponentially and witness an upsurge in demand citing the Coronavirus pandemic, as remote working has become the current norm. The Benefit Of UCaaS Under The Current Scenario By implementing unified communications through cloud-based services providers, an enterprise can minimize hardware expenses, improve work from home efficiencies, therefore enhancing employee productivity. As is oft-touted, UCaaS enables businesses the possibility to: Promptly achieve advanced features and functions with moderate CAPEX Integrated connection center and quicker customer management capabilities Diminish the hazard of technology obsolescence Gain access to proficient outsourcing organizations, bypassing ownership and operation Software development companies can enhance team collaboration and workstream collaboration specialities Change IT staff responsibilities to more substantial projects Increase resource collaboration when working away from the office and keep them updated with business developments AI and machine learning with advanced features such as intelligent call routing Enterprises can remotely manage and administer systems, users, and employee work collaboration Workplace management with IoT services, multimedia messages and online messaging How Different As-a-Service (aaS) Products Are Emerging Nowadays The COVID-19 has thrust the “future of work” to the forefront of revolution with shocking speed, from the rise of robots and the trends in IoT services to machine learning and Artificial Intelligence. All these inclinations point to an innovative world that’s shaping up quite distinctively from anything we’ve ever seen, or worked in, before. While Unified Communications evolves, its main objective currently is to integrate enterprise communication tools so that collaboration can be made simple. These tools combine real-time monitoring, video calling, instant messaging, desktop sharing, and web/mobile applications. With the use of UC, all these technologies can be combined into one neat little but major package. Here are the different As-a-Service (aaS) products that provide a consistent user experience. United Communications as a Service (UCaaS) Just like SaaS, UCaaS empowers enterprises to only spend on what they require and utilize. In essence, UCaaS presents both communication and collaboration by cloud integration, thereby experiencing instant connections across several devices. Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) Along with UCaaS, enterprises are now considering CPaaS, the Communications Platform-as-a-Service technology. CPaaS provides several of the communicative tools as the UCaaS framework but grants them as objects that can be integrated via APIs into the core applications of an enterprise. Contact Center as-a-Service (CCaaS) CCaaS, as the name indicates can develop enhanced customer service experience. As a result, some collaboration technologies featured in UCaaS and CPaaS typically overlap with the features by CCaaS. By using all three 'as-a-Service' models, enterprises can overcome the impact COVID-19 has on the interaction and collaboration between employees or businesses. The Rise of Technology During Covid-19 Pandemic The intense competition and increasing consumer expectations are reconstructing the dynamics of Unified communication as a service (UCaaS) technology, encouraging solution providers to innovate and enhance their customer engagement. The prompt transition among consumers towards cloud communication is stressing for the necessity for improved customer productivity and network flexibility and is proposing possibilities for exceptional communication and collaboration tools. The COVID-19 pandemic has emerged as an unprecedented challenge for humankind as various sectors, industries, and individuals attempts to mitigate the uncertainties associated with it. From a business perspective, it bodes for enterprises to switch to remote working, , and implement the different models of Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS). adopt the latest IoT services The impact is felt everywhere, right from human interactions, workplace practices, remote working, and has also affected our leisure time. The circumstance has driven various sectors into a novel era whether it’s how to manage collaboration while working remotely, how to minimize interaction with trending IoT services and also how to minimize the spread of COVID while keeping the workforce engaged and operational in general.

How the Pandemic Has Driven the Rise of Collaboration Through UCaas

This week the API-based communications platform giant Twilio formally announced that it would acquire the customer data platform startup Segment for $3.2 billion in all stocks. The market responded quite positively to the news, driving Twilio’s stock price up by 7.7%, bring Twilio’s market cap to a staggering $49 billion. Founded in 2011, Segment is a San Francisco-based startup with the promise to disrupt traditional CRM with a seamless experience powered by customer data infrastructure. It has raised a total funding of $284 million from Thrive Capital, Sapphire Ventures, Accel & GV, among others. It was recently valued at $1.5 billion, after raising the new round in Apr 2019 to deepen its core data infrastructure platform and, more importantly, to fuel its global expansion. It is estimated that the Segment’s annual recurring revenue could reach $100 million by end of 2020, with more than 75% non-GAAP gross margins on its subscription-based revenue from over 20k customers. The $3.2 billion acquisition of Segment is by far Twilio’s largest M&A deal, beyond the $2 billion all-stock privatization of the API-centric email platform SendGrid, a major competitor of MailChimp, back 2018. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring together the two leading developer-focused communications platforms to create the unquestioned platform of choice for all companies looking to transform their customer engagement,” said Twilio co-founder and CEO Jeff Lawson. Global Competition The news of the Twilio-Segment acquisition was first broke by Forbes on Friday, Oct 9, only 1 day (by US time) after Twilio’s competitor MessageBird raised a mega Series C of $200M led by Spark Capital, valuing the Dutch company at $3 billion. Founded in 2016 from Amsterdam, MessageBird has been establishing itself as the international archrival of Twilio, much like its Dutch fellow Fintech superstar Adyen compared to Stripe from San Francisco in their early days. Therefore, Twilio’s acquisition of Segment would also help it strengthen its global foothold to compete against MessageBird armed with fresh dry powder. Long Term Vision Besides competing for global market share, the more essential synergy of the combined new company comes from better achieving Twilio’s vision to build the world’s leading customer engagement platform. “Understanding customer data is key to achieving this vision,” as highlighted in the presentation. Essentially, what Segment can bring to Twilio is the comprehensive single view of a customer. Segment’s unique data infrastructure will be able to empower Twilio’s customer communications platform, so that we no longer need to suffer from the broken customer engagement process because of the lack of customer insights. A customer would no longer have to waste hours to be pushed back and forth between different departments from the merchant end and to repeatedly describe the customer’s purchase or service history with the merchant. On the other hand, the merchant benefits from better engagement insights with the customer so that it can be more efficient in targeted sales and marketing, offering a more personalized and impactful customer experience. “The one thing that’s always been missing from Twilio as we’ve been building up this customer engagement platform is understanding of the end-users themselves,” said Twilio co-founder and CEO Jeff Lawson. “We power the communications, but we don’t actually know who the customers are.” Meanwhile, the acquisition is a brilliant strategic move to take the advantage of Twilio’s recently hyped market cap. The COVID19 crisis has driven the valuation of a lot of SaaS companies up through the roof, including Twilio, whose stock price has grown more than 3X since the breakout of the pandemic. Whether the recent SaaS valuation hype is a bubble or anchored by long-term vision, Twilio is definitely smart to acquire strategic assets with its highly-valued stocks. As I was discussing the similar valuation hype in Fintech in my previous post, Twilio’s example showcased the optimal strategy in the current situation. Strategic Advantages and Potentials The strategic thinking of Twilio’s vision, as described by its CEO Jeff Lawson, sounds a lot like how direct-to-consumer (DTC) disrupted the traditional sales channel structures. In the past, brands rely on wholesale brokers or regional agency-representatives, who power sales and marketing, but brands don’t know who the end-customers are. With the data brought by Ecommerce, individual brands now have much better insights on their customers in terms of their tastes, preferences, and personalities, which can help better build out the brand image. Hence, we saw a group of strong DTC brands such as Warby Parker, Bonobos, Allbirds, and Peloton. Even the big players like Nike are putting a high priority on building out their own DTC-style membership to better understand and reach their shoppers. The rise of Ecommerce later caused the rise of Fintech, as Ecommerce platforms and individual DTC brands alike were looking for better payment experiences on desktop and mobile ends. Therefore, the mega-platforms such as eBay, Amazon, and Alibaba have built out in-house Fintech functions — some later grew too big and thus had to be spun off such as PayPal and Ant Group, others have formed strong partnerships with now fintech powerhouses, such as Shopify with Stripe, eBay and BigCommerce with Adyen, and (arguably) Weebly acquired by Square. Beyond just processing payments, Fintech companies are also powerful data sources for Ecommerce companies to better analyze their shoppers so that they can iterate on their marketing and sales strategies. However, so far, most of the innovation around Ecommerce and Fintech has only centered around either the part (marketing) or the part (payment), but not much has been done on the part, or shopper lifecycle part. And this could be Twilio’s strategic advantage. pre-sales at-sales post-sales For any brand’s financial success, LTV is the ultimate topline, and CAC is like the necessary evil. Better efficiency in the and processes can definitely help optimize CAC by lower marketing costs and minimize involuntary churn (caused by clunky payment process). There are enough service providers or partners where any brand can find great actionable insights. pre-sales at-sales Nonetheless, in terms of handling existing customer engagement, or the part, most still outsource it to call-centers who treat their valued customers badly, or some better ones start using Twilio and MessageBird but lack good data and insights to effectively maximize LTV. Therefore, equipped with the customer data infrastructure from Segment, the new Twilio has the potential to be the ultimate LTV engine for brands. post-sales Opportunities Ahead The only part missing for Twilio now is a Fintech arm, so that it can move beyond its strategic stronghold of to . As for , much of Segment’s data infrastructure can already help improve Twilio’s product offering in marketing, so what Twilio really needs now is a Fintech product to close the whole sales loop and customer lifecycle. post-sales at-sales pre-sales Similarly, for MessageBird to gain an upper-hand, the newly raised $200 million could be partially used to seek out a Fintech acquisition target, although most of the incumbent ones have grown above affordable price range. On the other hand, as some payment Fintech companies have explored the idea of leveraging financial data (at-sales) to power more efficient marketing (pre-sales), it is also likely that those who benefited from the recent valuation surge to acquire a customer engagement platform (post-sales) similar to Twilio or MessageBird. Adyen is definitely closer to MessageBird as they are both headquartered in Amsterdam, but Adyen strongly believes in organic growth and has never acquired a company in its almost 14 years of life. Twilio’s sheer size makes it a formidable acquisition target for any payment company, even for PayPal or Ant Group. Whatever the potential deal might look like or whoever it might be between, one thing we know for certain is that those who have benefited from the COVID-driven valuation surge need to take advantage of the opportunity to transform the buzz into long-term strategic value.

Why Did Twilio Acquire Segment for $3.2 Billion? To Better Understand End User Data

Writing our own Haskell code using only simple libraries is fun. But we can’t do everything from scratch. There are all kinds of cools services out there to use so we don’t have to. We can interface with a lot of these by using APIs. Often, the most well supported APIs use languages like Python and Javascript. But adventurous Haskell developers have also developed bindings for these systems! So in the next few weeks, we’ll be exploring a couple of these. We’ll also see what we can do when there isn’t an out-of-the-box library for us to use. This week, we’ll focus on the Twilio API. We’ll see how we can send SMS messages from our Haskell code using the library. We’ll also write a simple server to use Twilio’s callback system to receive text messages and process them programmatically. You can follow along with the code here on the for this series. twilio Github repository Of course, none of this is useful if you’ve never written any Haskell before! If you want to get started with the language basics, download our . To learn more about advanced techniques and libraries, grab our ! Beginners Checklist Production Checklist Setting Up Our Account Naturally, you’ll need a Twilio account to use the Twilio API. Once you have this set up, you need to add your first Twilio number. This will be the number you’ll send text messages to. You’ll also see it as the sender for other messages in your system. You should also go through the process of verifying your own phone number. This will allow you to send and receive messages on that phone without “publishing” your app. You also need a couple other pieces of information from your account. There’s the account SID, and the authentication token. You can find these on the dashboard for your project on the Twilio page. You’ll need these values in your code. But since you don’t want to put them into version control, you should save them as environment variables on your machine. Then when you need to, you can fetch them like so: fetchSid :: IO StringfetchSid = getEnv “TWILIO_ACCOUT_SID”

fetchToken :: IO StringfetchToken = getEnv “TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN” Sending a Message The first thing we’ll want to do is use the API to actually send a text message. We perform Twilio actions within the monad. It’s rather straightforward to access this monad from . All we need is the function: Twilio IO runTwilio’ runTwilio’ :: IO String -> IO String -> Twilio a -> IO a The first two parameters to this function are actions to fetch the account SID and auth token. We've already written those. Then the final parameter of course is our action. IO Twilio sendMessage :: IO ()sendMessage = runTwilio’ fetchSid fetchToken $ do  ... To compose a message, we’ll use the constructor. This takes three parameters. First, the “to” number of our message. Fill this in with the number to your physical phone. Then the second parameter is the “from” number, which has to be our Twilio account’s phone number. Then the third parameter is the message itself. To send the message, all we have to do is use the function! That’s all there is to it! PostMessage post sendMessage :: IO ()sendMessage = runTwilio’ fetchSid fetchToken $ do  let msg = PostMessage “+15551231234” “+15559879876” “Hello Twilio!”  _ <- post msg  return () And just like that, you’ve sent your first Twilio message! Note that it does cost a small amount of money to send messages over Twilio. But a trial account should give you enough free credit to experiment a little bit. Receiving Messages Now, it’s a little more complicated to deal with incoming messages. The first thing we need to do is create a webhook on our Twilio account. To do this, go to “Manage Numbers” from your project dashboard page. Then select your Twilio number. You’ll now want to scroll to the section called “Messaging” and then within that, find “A Message Comes In”. You want to select “Webhook” in the dropdown. Then you’ll need to specify a URL where your server is located, and select “HTTP Post”. For setting up a quick server, I use Heroku combined with this that works with Stack. I’ll go into that in more depth in a later article. But the main thing to see is that our endpoint is . nifty build pack /api/sms With this webhook set up, Twilio will send a post request to the endpoint every time a user texts our number. The request will contain the message and the number of the sender. So let’s set up a server using Servant to pick up that request. We’ll start by specifying a simple type to encode the message we’ll receive from Twilio: data IncomingMessage = IncomingMessage  { fromNumber :: Text  , body :: Text  } Twilio encodes its post request body as . In order for Servant to deserialize this, we’ll need to define an instance of the class for our type. This function takes in a hash map from keys to lists of values. It will return either an error string or our desired value. FormURLEncoded FromForm instance FromForm IncomingMessage where  fromForm :: Form -> Either Text IncomingMessage  fromForm (From form) = ... So is a hash map, and we want to look up the “From” number of the message as well as its body. Then as long as we find at least one result for each of these, we’ll return the message. Otherwise, we return an error. form instance FromForm IncomingMessage where  fromForm :: Form -> Either Text IncomingMessage  fromForm (From form) = case lookupResults of    Just ((fromNumber : _), (body : _)) ->       Right $ IncomingMessage fromNumber body    Just _ -> Left “Found the keys but no values”    Nothing -> Left “Didn’t find keys”    where      lookupResults = do        fromNumber <- HashMap.lookup “From” form        body <- HashMap.lookup “Body” form        return (fromNumber, body) Now that we have this instance, we can finally define our API endpoint! All it needs are the simple path components and the request body. For now, we won’t actually post any response. type TwilioServerAPI = "api" :> "sms" :>   ReqBody '[FormUrlEncoded] IncomingMessage :> Post '[JSON] () Writing our Handler Now let’s we want to write a handler for our endpoint. First though, we’ll write a natural transformation so we can write our handler in the monad. Twilio transformToHandler :: Twilio :~> HandlertransformToHandler = NT $ \action ->   liftIO $ runTwilio' fetchSid fetchToken action Now we’ll write a simple handler that will echo the user’s message back to them. twilioNum :: TexttwilioNum “+15559879876”

smsHandler :: IncomingMessage -> Twilio ()smsHandler msg = do  let newMessage = PostMessage (fromNumber msg) twilioNum (body msg)  _ <- post newMessage  return () And now we wrap up with some of the Servant mechanics to run our server. twilioAPI :: Proxy TwilioServerAPItwilioAPI = Proxy :: Proxy TwilioServerAPI

twilioServer :: Server TwilioServerAPItwilioServer = enter transformToHandler smsHandler

runServer :: IO ()runServer = do  port <- read <$> getEnv “PORT”  run port (serve twilioAPI twilioServer) And now if we send a text message to our Twilio number, we’ll see that same message back as a reply! Conclusion In this article, we saw how we could use just a few simple lines of Haskell to send and receive text messages. There was a fair amount of effort required in using the Twilio tools themselves, but most of that is easy once you know where to look! Come back next week and we’ll explore how we can send emails with the API. We’ll see how we can combine text and email for some pretty cool functionality. Mailgun An important thing making these apps easy is knowing the right tools to use! One of the tools we used in this part was the Servant web API library. To learn more about this, be sure to check out our . For more ideas of web libraries to use, download our . Haskell Web Skills Series Production Checklist And if you’ve never written Haskell before, hopefully I’ve convinced you that it IS possible to do some cool things with the language! Download our to get stated! Beginners Checklist

Sending Texts with Twilio + Haskell!

Since 2009, has enabled developers to seamlessly build SMS and Voice technology into their apps, handling everything from basic user notifications, connecting drivers and passengers in apps like Uber and Lyft, to conference calling and more. If you haven’t had a chance to incorporate Twilio’s services into your product yet, here’s your chance to start! We’re happy to team up with Twilio’s functionality to show you how to bring Voice + SMS into your product or company in only a couple of minutes with StdLib! Twilio Maybe you’ve used Twilio before, or maybe you haven’t but you’re extremely interested in playing with programmable telephony and bringing it to your team or company. With the past success of our “Build” articles (like ), we’re excited to share StdLib’s quickest article yet — we’re happy to introduce how you can build a Twilio Messaging Hub in only 7 Minutes with StdLib! Build a Slack Bot in 9 Minutes If you haven’t used StdLib before you’re in for a treat — . It’s effectively a package manager for APIs that’s built upon new “serverless” architecture, meaning you never have to worry about managing servers or allocating resources for scale. Write a function, deploy, and you’re ready to go! We also have a growing ecosystem of integrations contributed by other developers that are extremely easy to plug in to. StdLib is the fastest way to ship business value via code Once you’ve created your StdLib service in , you’ll get a file that shows you how to hack your Twilio + StdLib Messaging Hub to your own needs. Minute 4 README.md What You’ll Need Beforehand 1x Twilio Account 1x Command Line Terminal 7x Minutes (or 420x Seconds) Minute 1: Create Your Twilio Phone Number The first thing you’ll want to do to get your Stdlib + Twilio messaging hub operational is grab a new phone number for your Twilio Account. First, make sure you’re logged in to your Twilio Account at . https://www.twilio.com/login Log In to Twilio From here, you’ll be at your . If this is your first time with Twilio, you’ll see a screen that looks like this (below). On the left menu, hit the button with the circle and ellipsis “ ” inside: Twilio Console (…) You want to select “All Products and Services” on the grey bar on the left From here, a slider menu will pop out. You want to select under the heading: Phone Numbers Super Network Click “# Phone Numbers” To add your first phone number, hit “ ”: Get Started And then “ ”: Get Your First Twilio Phone Number You’ll see a popup suggesting a random number for your geolocation, in this case, 415 is San Francisco. Click “ ” to continue quickly. (You can buy other numbers later.) Choose this Number You’ll be greeted with a success message. Awesome! Minute 2: StdLib Account Setup In order to create a robust messaging hub, you’ll next need to set up your Account. You’ll use StdLib to host your Twilio Hub using infinitely scalable “serverless” architecture from a single, maintainable codebase, and to hook into other integrations on StdLib (for example, using to format images you receive via MMS or using to see income ranges for the zip code associated with an incoming phone number). Simply visit and click “Sign Up Free” to create your account. StdLib utils.image devin.income-predictor https://stdlib.com Click “Sign Up” to Create an Account Minute 3: Create a StdLib Workspace so to ensure there are no compatibility issues you’ll likely want to run it (though Node 6 and 7 will work for this example). You can install the latest version of Node from the . Once complete, open up your Terminal or Command Line and install the with the following: StdLib natively runs Node.js 8.0.0 (yes, the newest version) Official Node.js Website StdLib Command Line Tools $ npm install lib.cli -g This gives you access to the command for service management and execution. Next, create a directory for your StdLib services. lib stdlib $ mkdir stdlib$ cd stdlib$ lib init Log in using the credentials you created in the previous step. That’s it! Minute 4: StdLib Service Creation Next you’ll create your StdLib service from the command line. We’ve created a special template to allow you to ship a prototype of your own Twilio Hub in only a few seconds. twilio $ lib create -t twilio You’ll be asked to enter a , we recommend for the purposes of this tutorial. You’ll see some NPM packages being installed locally and your service directory being created: Service Name twilio-hub Once complete, you’ll be told to enter your service directory. Do so with the command: $ cd user/twilio-hub Where is, of course, your StdLib username. (In my case, it’s .) user keith From here, you can try running some SMS commands (these will be the responses for or sent to your Twilio number) with: “more” “whoami” $ lib .messaging.more And see the result: The SMS response to people who message your number with the text “more.” Or, alternatively, turn on debug mode with to see what’s going on behind the scenes: -d $ lib .messaging.whoami -d Since this isn’t actually being triggered by Twilio’s webhook, execution information (zipcode, city) reads as , so this is expected. undefined Minute 5: Configure Your StdLib Environment As a next step, we’ll want to make sure StdLib knows all of our Twilio Account details. To set this up properly, first open up in the StdLib service directory you just created, where, again, is your username. env.json user/twilio-hub/env.json user You can see three different environments: , and . These are intended for different execution contexts — when running locally, the environment variables in are used, you can deploy to a environment in the cloud, or a production environment. We generally recommend at least using a different phone number. local dev release local dev release Make sure, for the purposes of this tutorial, you fill in the **dev** and **local** variables with the same values. To fill in visit , log in, click on the left, then to reveal your token. Copy and paste it into your environment variables. "STDLIB_TOKEN" https://dashboard.stdlib.com/dashboard/ Library Tokens Show Token Click “Show Token” to reveal your token, then copy it. Next, , , and — these are all available from your Twilio Console at . Copy your directly, and click the eyeball beside your to reveal it and copy it as well. "TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID" "TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN" "TWILIO_NUMBER" https://www.twilio.com/console ACCOUNT SID AUTH TOKEN Copy your Account SID and your Twilio Auth Token into your Environment Variables To find your Twilio Phone Number you previously created, visit . Click on the red, highlighted number you created in . https://www.twilio.com/console/phone-numbers/incoming Minute 1 Click on the Red Text to Configure Your Number From the next screen, copy and paste the value in the format to your value. PHONE NUMBER +1234567890 "TWILIO_NUMBER" Copy the “PHONE NUMBER” value , the value can be filled in with . Use the format again (make sure it’s in quotes). Best bet is to use a personal phone number for demonstration purposes. Finally "CALL_FORWARD_NUMBER" any phone number of your choosing, it is the number that your Twilio Hub will automatically redirect incoming calls to +1234567890 Minute 6: Deploy and Configure Webhooks You’re almost done! The very last step is to deploy your StdLib Twilio Hub (with the appropriate environment variables set above) and then configure Twilio Webhooks to point to StdLib. To deploy your StdLib Twilio Hub in a environment, simply open up your command line in your service directory and type: dev $ lib up dev You’ll see the progress of your service deploying to a development environment, and be greeted with a list of available HTTP endpoints corresponding to everything in your directory. functions/ Now that your service is live, go back to the Twilio Manage Numbers dashboard and select your phone number again. Scroll down to first: https://www.twilio.com/console/phone-numbers/incoming Voice & Fax Enter in your “voice” endpoint to Voice & Fax On this form, beside , make sure is selected in the dropdown and use the value (where is of course, your username). Note that the hostname is our functions gateway, where all of your services and functions will be deployed to. A CALL COMES IN Webhook https://<user>.api.stdlib.com/twilio-hub@dev/voice/ <user> api.stdlib.com Next, scroll down to and enter in in the Webhook handler. Messaging https://<user>.api.stdlib.com/twilio-hub@dev/messaging/ A MESSAGE COMES IN Enter in your Messaging Handler details, and hit Save Finally, hit in the bottom left. Save Minute 7: Add Verified Phone Numbers If this is your first time signing up with Twilio, you’ll be using a trial account. Trial accounts have limitations on numbers they can send messages to or forward calls from. To make sure your Twilio Messaging Hub on StdLib works as you expect it, use the list to add any phone numbers that you want to forward calls or send messages to. verified phone numbers https://twilio.com/user/account/phone-numbers/verified By default, the phone number you registered your account with should already be listed here. That’s It! Your Twilio Messaging Hub on StdLib is live! You can now send SMS messages to your Twilio Number to receive an automated response and make calls to your number to have them forwarded. Otherwise, you’re good to go! If you’re using a Twilio trial account, make sure you’ve added verified numbers in Minute 7. A Twilio Bot Interaction using StdLib You can modify the behavior of your SMS Bot by visiting the directory in your StdLib service. The default responses are are to “whoami” and “more.” This messaging hub also handles MMS (media, picture) uploads. /functions/messaging/ Gotchas and Production Releases If at any point you lose track of your StdLib username or what your webhook callbacks should be, they’re listed when you deploy a service with . $ lib up dev If you’re not getting the expected responses when you play, Twilio has an amazing debugger at . https://www.twilio.com/console/dev-tools/debugger To ship a bot / messaging hub to production, we recommend using a different phone number. Configure your environment variables in to the appropriate settings, set your in to (or whatever you’d like, really), ship a release with and then you can use and as your voice and messaging endpoints for your production phone number. release env.json version package.json 1.0.0 $ lib release https://<user>.api.stdlib.com/twilio-hub@1.0.0/voice/ https://<user>.api.stdlib.com/twilio-hub@1.0.0/messaging/ Thank You! If you’d like to keep track of future StdLib updates and more Twilio fun, please follow us on Twitter at — or you can follow me, specifically at Thanks for reading! @StdLibHQ @keithwhor. At StdLib we’re focused on making the lives of software developers easier by getting them back to doing what they love best — writing code and building awesome products. If you’d like to help us on our mission, please reach out to careers@stdlib.com with a little bit about yourself!

Build a “Serverless” Twilio SMS + Call Forwarding Bot in 7 Minutes using Node.js + StdLib

If you’re a marketing department and you want to reach the widest audience possible, text messaging is the best channel to do that with. Most people check their texts more often than email, and text messages have a 90%+ open rate within three minutes of reception. To send SMS and MMS messages at scale you need a cloud communications platform — a.k.a. a communications platform as a service (CPaaS). Peer-to-peer review site G2 lists more than 100 of them, with Plivo ranked number one for customer satisfaction. Throughout this article we’ll use Plivo and Twilio, the CPaaS market share leader, as examples. What’s Your Number? Once you’ve settled on a CPaaS, you have another decision to make: What number type should you use to send your messages? g follows different rules from person-to-person (P2P) texting. Businesses have three options: Commercial application-to-person (A2P) messagin 10-digit long codes (10DLC), toll-free numbers, and short codes. 10DLC Numbers Long codes are normal 10-digit phone numbers — the kind that individuals use every day to engage in P2P conversational messaging. is a service offered by major US carriers to explicitly allow commercial A2P SMS traffic over long code phone numbers. 10DLC is available only in the US. 10DLC You can turn long codes into 10DLC numbers by registering them with a carrier, which you can do through your CPaaS provider. Provisioning a 10DLC number takes less than a week. A vetting process determines the maximum throughput a carrier will allow for a 10DLC number. Throughput is the number of messages they can send in a given time period — messages per second, for example. Toll-Free are used by businesses that want their customers to reach them at no cost. In North America, 800, 888, 877, 866, 855, 844, and 833 denote toll-free numbers. Toll-free numbers Businesses provide toll-free numbers so that incoming calls are free of charge for the calling party, but they can also be enabled for SMS messaging through your carrier or CPaaS, generally in about one business day. Short Codes are five- or six-digit numbers used to send and receive SMS messages. Short codes Unlike long code numbers, shortcodes are not tied to an area code, so they can be used across a country to provide a nationwide brand identity under one easy-to-remember number. Short codes take the longest to acquire — up to 16 weeks. Throughput and Cost Two major differences between number types are their maximum throughput and cost. Throughput Limits Carriers impose varying maximum throughput on different number types. Generally speaking, short codes support the highest throughput and toll-free numbers the lowest. 10DLC numbers sit in the middle. Carrier-imposed throughput for 10DLC numbers depends on vetting scores assigned by an independent organization called The Carrier Registry. Cost Considerations There are three kinds of costs involved in messaging: one-time setup costs, number rental costs, and cost per message. All pricing numbers that we quote below were taken from the two representative vendors’ pricing pages. Short codes incur the highest setup costs: $1,500 for Plivo and $500 for Twilio. 10DLC numbers incur $44 charges for brand and campaign registration and vetting. There are no one-time charges for toll-free numbers. Number rental costs for long codes and toll-free numbers are negligible compared to usage costs for organizations that send a lot of messages. Short code rental costs, however, are significant. Cost per message depends on several factors: whether you’re sending or receiving messages, whether you’re using SMS or MMS, and which carrier you use. Your CPaaS vendor’s pricing page can break it down for you. For comparison purposes, we put together a table showing pricing for sending SMS messages, which for many businesses is the most common use case, and arbitrarily chose T-Mobile as the carrier for which to show surcharges in this table; the “plus” numbers are the T-Mobile carrier surcharges. Run the Numbers All of the different options make it difficult to figure out which number type makes the most economic sense. The best way to decide is to create a spreadsheet that includes the number of SMS and MMS messages you plan to send and receive per month, and factor in your carrier’s surcharges. Regardless of which number type you use, message senders must obtain opt-in consent before texting consumers — and be aware of other considerations. Plivo’s SMS best practices guide lays out those considerations for businesses that want to take advantage of the best channel for business communications — text messaging.

How to Send SMS and MMS Messages at Scale: What is Your Number?

Cómo enviar mensajes SMS y MMS a escala: ¿Cuál es su número?

Comment envoyer des messages SMS et MMS à grande échelle : quel est votre numéro ?

बड़े पैमाने पर एसएमएस और एमएमएस संदेश कैसे भेजें: आपका नंबर क्या है?

SMS および MMS メッセージを大規模に送信する方法: あなたの番号は何ですか?

Como enviar mensagens SMS e MMS em escala: Qual é o seu número?

Cách gửi tin nhắn SMS và MMS ở quy mô lớn: Số của bạn là gì?

如何大规模发送 SMS 和 MMS 消息：您的电话号码是多少？

Because Twilio has high name recognition, many organizations consider it first when investigating communications platforms as a service (CPaaS). After trying Twilio, though, they may find themselves less than completely satisfied, maybe because of high pricing or unsatisfactory support or some other factor. Fortunately, highly regarded Twilio alternatives can help ease the pain. We suggest Plivo, which earns the among cloud communications platforms on G2. highest marks for customer satisfaction If you’re not satisfied with Twilio, you don’t have to rip it out and replace it with a Twilio alternative. You can put Plivo in place for a pilot program for a single use case and see how it performs. If you’re satisfied, you can switch over, or you can use Plivo in parallel with Twilio, or as a backup alternative in case your primary provider experiences downtime. Migrating from Twilio to Plivo is simple. The two companies’ API structures, implementation mechanisms, XML structure, SMS message processing, and voice call processing are similar. Twilio and Plivo enjoy feature parity in virtually every aspect, including Voice API SMS/MMS API Programmatically managing call flows Geo permissions Number lookup API Phone number management Validating requests Subaccounts Speech recognition SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language) Browser and mobile SDKs Transcription Custom SIP headers HTTP callbacks You can migrate your existing application from Twilio to Plivo by refactoring the code, or you can try Plivo High-Level Objects (PHLO), an intuitive visual workflow builder. Follow one of Plivo’s quickstart guides for your preferred language and web framework. Plivo offers server SDKs in seven languages: PHP, Node.js, .NET, Java, Python, Ruby, and Go. How to Make an Outbound Call Let’s take a look at the code for a Ruby application that makes an outbound call in both Twilio to Plivo. Whether you use Ruby or one of the other supported languages, you can migrate from one platform to the other by refactoring just a few lines of code. Twilio require 'rubygems'
require 'twilio-ruby'

account_sid = ENV['<TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID>']
auth_token = ENV['<TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN>']
@client = Twilio::REST::Client.new(account_sid, auth_token)

call = @client.calls.create(
            url: 'http://demo.twilio.com/docs/classic.mp3',
            to: '+1415555222',
            from: '+14155551111'
)
puts call.sid Plivo require 'rubygems'
require 'plivo'

include Plivo
include Plivo::Exceptions

auth_id = ENV['<PLIVO_AUTH_ID>']
auth_token = ENV['<PLIVO_AUTH_TOKEN>']

api = RestClient.new(auth_id,auth_token)

begin
  response = api.calls.create(
    '+14155551111',
    ['+14155552222'],
    'https://s3.amazonaws.com/static.plivo.com/answer.xml'
  )

  puts response
rescue PlivoRESTError => e
  puts 'Exception: ' + e.message
end How to Receive an Incoming Call You can migrate an application for receiving and handling an incoming call just as easily. Twilio require 'sinatra'
require 'twilio-ruby'

post '/twiml' do
  # Start our TwiML response
  Twilio::TwiML::VoiceResponse.new do |r|
    r.say(message: 'Hello, world!', voice: 'alice')
  end.to_s
end Plivo include Plivo
include Plivo::XML
include Plivo::Exceptions

class PlivoController < ApplicationController
 def inbound
    response = Response.new
    speak_body = 'Hello, world!'
    response.addSpeak(speak_body)

    xml = Plivo::PlivoXML.new(response)
    render xml: xml.to_xml
 end
end How to Forward an Incoming Call The same goes for an application that automatically forwards an incoming call. Twilio require 'sinatra'
require 'twilio-ruby'

post '/twiml' do

   response = Twilio::TwiML::VoiceResponse.new
   response.dial(number: '415-234-5678')
   response.say(message: 'Goodbye')
   puts response
   end.to_s
end Plivo def forward
   response = Response.new
   dial = response.addDial()
   dest_number = "415-234-5678"
   dial.addNumber(dest_number)

   xml = PlivoXML.new(response)
   puts xml.to_xml
   render xml: xml.to_xml
 end We don’t want to overload you with code here (especially if you use a language other than Ruby). You can get more information about how to implement voice applications in Plivo from the , available for all seven programming languages and PHLO. use case guide documentation One of Plivo’s key principles is to keep things simple for developers while we allow them to build complex applications. See for yourself how simple it is for a Twilio developer to pick up Plivo. Simple and Reliable Plivo’s simple APIs work in tandem with a comprehensive global network to let you build robust voice applications with low latency and high call quality. See for yourself by signing up for a free Plivo trial account that you can experiment with, which comes with free credits.

Migrating a Voice-Enabled Application 
from Twilio to Plivo

Salesforce developers have contributed much to the open-source community. Among their many contributions is an important, but perhaps lesser-known, project named oclif. The was announced in early 2018 and has since grown to become the foundation for the Salesforce CLI and the Heroku CLI. Open CLI Framework In this post, we will provide a brief overview of oclif, and then we’ll walk through how to build a simple CLI with oclif. A Brief History of oclif Oclif started as an internal Heroku project. Heroku has always been focused on developer experience, and its CLI sets the standard for working with a service via the API. After all, Heroku is the creator of for deployment—a standard now widely used across the industry. git push heroku If you've ever run or , then you've used oclif. From the start, oclif was designed to be an open, extensible, lightweight framework for quickly building CLIs, both simple and complex. heroku ps sfdx auth:list More than four years after release, oclif has become the authoritative framework for building CLIs. Some of the most popular oclif components see more than a million weekly downloads. The oclif project is still under active development. Some examples of high-profile companies or projects built via oclif include: Salesforce Heroku Twilio Adobe Firefly Stream Why would a developer choose oclif today? There are many reasons one might want to build a CLI. Perhaps your company has an API, and you'd like to make it easier for customers to consume it. Maybe you work with an internal API, and you'd like to run commands via the CLI to automate daily tasks. In these scenarios, you could always write Powershell or Bash scripts or build your own CLI from scratch, but oclif is the best option. Oclif is built on Node.js. It runs on all major operating systems and has multiple distribution options. Along with being fast, oclif is also self-documenting and supports plugins, allowing developers to build and share reusable functionality. As oclif rapidly gains adoption, more and more libraries, plugins, and useful packages are becoming available. For example, comes pre-packaged with the package and provides common UX functionality such as spinners and tables, and progress bars, which you can add to your CLI. cli-ux @oclif/core It's easy to see why oclif is a success and should be your choice for building a CLI. Introduction to Our Mini-project Let’s set the scene for the CLI you will build. You want to build your own CLI for one of your passions: . space travel You love space travel so much that you watch every SpaceX launch live, and you check the page more than you care to admit. You want to streamline this obsession by building a CLI for space travel details, starting with a simple command that will show you the number of people currently in space. Recently, you discovered a service called that has an API endpoint for this purpose. HowManyPeopleAreInSpaceRightNow.com Open Notify We'll use the command to create our project, which will scaffold a new CLI project with some sensible defaults. Projects created with this command use TypeScript by default—which is what we'll use for our project—but can be configured to use vanilla JavaScript as well. oclif generate Creating the Project To start, you’ll need Node.js locally if you don’t already have it. The oclif project requires the use of an active . LTS version of Node.js You can verify the version of Node.js that you have installed via this command: / $ node -v
v16.15.0 Next, install the oclif CLI globally: / $ npm install -g oclif Now, it’s time to create the oclif project using the generate command: / $ oclif generate space-cli

     _-----_
    |       |    ╭──────────────────────────╮
    |--(o)--|    │  Time to build an oclif  │
   `---------´   │    CLI! Version: 3.0.1   │
    ( _´U`_ )    ╰──────────────────────────╯
    /___A___\   /
     |  ~  |
   __'.___.'__
 ´   `  |° ´ Y `

Cloning into '/space-cli'... At this point, you will be presented with some setup questions. For this project, you can leave them all blank to use the defaults (indicated by the parentheses), or you can choose to fill them out yourself. The final question will ask you to select a package manager. For our example, choose . npm Starting with oclif’s hello world command From here, oclif will finish creating your CLI project for you. In the folder, you'll find some node scripts that you can run to test out your CLI while you're developing. These scripts will run the command from the built files in the folder. If you just run the script as is, you'll see something like this message: bin/ dist/ / $ cd space-cli/
/space-cli $ ./bin/run
oclif example Hello World CLI

VERSION
  space-cli/0.0.0 darwin-arm64 node-v16.15.0

USAGE
  $ space-cli [COMMAND]

TOPICS
  hello    Say hello to the world and others
  plugins  List installed plugins.

COMMANDS
  hello    Say hello
  help     Display help for space-cli.
  plugins  List installed plugins. By default, if you don’t specify a command to run for the CLI, it will display the help message. Let’s try again: /space-cli $ ./bin/run hello
 >   Error: Missing 1 required arg:
 >   person  Person to say hello to
 >   See more help with --help This time, we received an error. We’re missing a required argument: We need to specify who we’re greeting! /space-cli $ ./bin/run hello John
 >   Error: Missing required flag:
 >    -f, --from FROM  Whom is saying hello
 >   See more help with --help We received another helpful error message. We need to specify the greeter as well, this time with a flag: /space-cli $ ./bin/run hello John --from Jane
hello John from Jane! (./src/commands/hello/index.ts) Finally, we’ve properly greeted John, and we can take a look at the hello command’s code, which can be found in . It looks like this: src/commands/hello/index.ts import {Command, Flags} from '@oclif/core'

export default class Hello extends Command {
  static description = 'Say hello'

  static examples = [
    `$ oex hello friend --from oclif
hello friend from oclif! (./src/commands/hello/index.ts)
`,
  ]

  static flags = {
    from: Flags.string({char: 'f', description: 'Whom is saying hello', required: true}),
  }

  static args = [{name: 'person', description: 'Person to say hello to', required: true}]

  async run(): Promise<void> {
    const {args, flags} = await this.parse(Hello)

    this.log(`hello ${args.person} from ${flags.from}! (./src/commands/hello/index.ts)`)
  }
} As you can see, an oclif command is simply defined as a class with an method, which unsurprisingly contains the code that is executed when the command runs. In addition, some static properties provide additional functionality, although they're all optional. async run() The and properties are used for the help message. description examples The property is an object which defines the flags available for the command, where the keys of the object correspond to the flag name. We'll dig into those a bit more later. flags Finally, is an array of objects representing arguments the command can take with some options. args The method parses the arguments and flags and then prints out a message using the argument and flag using (a non-blocking alternative to ). Notice both the flag and argument are configured with , which is all it takes to get validation and helpful error messages like those we saw in our earlier testing. run() person from this.log() console.log required: true Creating our own command Now that we understand the anatomy of a command, we’re ready to write our own. We’ll call it , and it will print out the number of people currently in space. You can delete the hello folder in , since we won't need it anymore. The oclif CLI can help us scaffold new commands, too: humans src/commands /space-cli $ oclif generate command humans

     _-----_
    |       |    ╭──────────────────────────╮
    |--(o)--|    │    Adding a command to   │
   `---------´   │ space-cli Version: 3.0.1 │
    ( _´U`_ )    ╰──────────────────────────╯
    /___A___\   /
     |  ~  |     
   __'.___.'__   
 ´   `  |° ´ Y ` 

   create src\commands\humans.ts
   create test\commands\humans.test.ts

No change to package.json was detected. No package manager install will be executed. Now we have a file we can edit, and we can start writing our command. The Open Notify API endpoint we will use can be found at the following URL: humans.ts http://open-notify.org/Open-Notify-API/People-In-Space/ As you can see in the description, the endpoint returns a simple JSON response with details about the humans currently in space. Replace the code in with the following: src/commands/humans.ts import {Command} from '@oclif/core'
import {get} from 'node:http'

export default class HumanCommand extends Command {
  static description = 'Get the number of humans currently in space.'

  static examples = [
    '$ space-cli humans\nNumber of humans currently in space: 7',
  ]

  public async run(): Promise<void> {
    get('http://api.open-notify.org/astros.json', res => {
      res.on('data', d => {
        const details = JSON.parse(d)
        this.log(`Number of humans currently in space: ${details.number}`)
      })
    }).on('error', e => {
      this.error(e)
    })
  }
} Here’s a breakdown of what we’re doing in the code above: Send a request to the Open Notify endpoint using the package. http Parse the JSON response. Output the number with a message. Catch and print any errors we may encounter along the way. For this first iteration of the command, we didn’t need any flags or arguments, so we’re not defining any properties for those. Testing our basic command Now, we can test out our new command. First, we’ll have to rebuild the files, and then we can run our command just like the hello world example from before: dist/ /spacecli $ npm run build

> space-cli@0.0.0 build
> shx rm -rf dist && tsc -b


/spacecli $ ./bin/run humans
Number of humans currently in space: 7 Pretty straightforward, isn’t it? You now have a simple CLI project, built via the oclif framework, that can instantly tell you the number of people in space. Enhancing our command with flags and a nicer UI Knowing how many people are currently in space is nice, but we can get even more space data! The endpoint we’re using provides more details about the spacefarers, including their names and which spacecraft they are on. We’ll take our command one step further, demonstrating how to use flags and giving our command a nicer UI. We can output our data as a table with the package, which has been rolled into (as of version ). To ensure we have access to , let’s update our packages. cli-ux @oclif/core 1.2.0 cli-ux /spacecli $ npm update We can add an optional flag to our command to print out this data in a table. We use the function for this pretty output. --table humans CliUx.ux.table() import {Command, Flags, CliUx} from '@oclif/core'
import {get} from 'node:http'

export default class HumansCommand extends Command {
  static description = 'Get the number of humans currently in space.'

  static examples = [
    '$ space-cli\nNumber of humans currently in space: 7',
  ]

  static flags = {
    table: Flags.boolean({char: 't', description: 'display who is in space and where with a table'}),
  }

  public async run(): Promise<void> {
    const {flags} = await this.parse(HumansCommand)

    get('http://api.open-notify.org/astros.json', res => {
      res.on('data', d => {
        const details = JSON.parse(d)
        this.log(`Number of humans currently in space: ${details.number}`)
        if (flags.table) {
          CliUx.ux.table(details.people, {name: {}, craft: {}})
        }
      })
    }).on('error', e => {
      this.error(e)
    })
  }
} In our updated code, our first step was to bring back the property. This time we're defining a boolean flag—it's either there, or it isn’t—as opposed to string flags which take a string as an argument. We also define a description and a shorthand -t for the flag in the options object that we're passing in. flags Next, we parse the flag in our method. If it’s present, we display a table with . The first argument, , is the data we want to display in the table, while the second argument is an object that defines the columns in the table. In this case, we define a and a column, each with an empty object. (There are some for the table columns, but we don't need any in this case.) Oclif will look for those properties on the data object that we pass in and take care of everything else for us! run CliUx.ux.table() details.people name craft configuration options We can build and rerun the command with the new table flag to see what that looks like: /spacecli $ ./bin/run humans --table
Number of humans currently in space: 10
 Name                   Craft    
 ───────────────── ──────── 
 Oleg Artemyev          ISS      
 Denis Matveev          ISS      
 Sergey Korsakov        ISS      
 Kjell Lindgren         ISS      
 Bob Hines              ISS      
 Samantha Cristoforetti ISS      
 Jessica Watkins        ISS      
 Cai Xuzhe              Tiangong 
 Chen Dong              Tiangong 
 Liu Yang               Tiangong Beautiful! Add some more functionality on your own At this point, our example project is complete, but you can easily build more on top of it. The Open Notify service provides an API endpoint to get the of the International Space Station. You might add that functionality, too, with a command such as to return the location when run. current location space-cli iss What about distribution? You might be thinking about distribution options for sharing your awesome new CLI. You could publish this project to npm via a simple command. You could create a tarball to distribute the project internally to your team or coworkers. You could also create a Homebrew formula if you wanted to share it with macOS users. Oclif can you with any of these options. help Conclusion We started this article by reviewing the history of oclif, along with the many reasons why it should be your first choice when creating a CLI. Some of its advantages include speed, extensibility, and a variety of distribution options. We learned how to scaffold a CLI project and add new commands to it, and built a simple CLI as an example. Now that you’ve been equipped with knowledge and a new tool, go out and be dangerous. Also Published Here

Building a Simple CLI with oclif

Over the few months I have been in the process of building a Data Science online school initially focusing on a rigorous introductory course covering modules ranging from linear algebra to SQL and programming. Without turning this into a 'marketing shill'. I decided to build a fairly simple WhatsApp chatbot that would take in input and return some output. With the main purpose being sending users programming and statistics problems in order to help them better develop their coding and stats skills. In addition to this, opening up a Slack channel where myself or mentors (Data Scientists in this context) could respond to coding issues raised by different learners. After doing some research, I learnt that Twilio released a Twilio WhatsApp API sometime ago. I opted to build a fairly basic flask chatbot using the Twilio WhatsApp API that would allow users to send some keywords, based on the keyword sent, reply with some output. To put it practically, if someone typed the keywords  'python easy', they would receive a random Python challenge that has been categorized as such from a list of challenges I crawled from different sources. The number and keyword(s) would then be sent to a relational database in order to better understand each user's behavior better and possibly tailor questions based on the input receive from different users. Ok, so let's get down to the fun part. I opted to use to act as the interface to my database. The documentation is very well written, making it a lot easier to pick up quickly. Flask-SQLAlchemy The most important part, atleast for the purposes of my use case, is connecting to the SQL database. app.config[ ] = app.config[ ] = 'SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI' 'dbms_name://user_name:password@db_host:port/db_name' 'SQLALCHEMY_TRACK_MODIFICATIONS' False From what I read I decided to disable to avoid getting the warning message I kept getting. This is a Flask-SQLAlchemy's event notification system that tracks any changes to the SQLAlchemy session and takes extra system resources. SQLALCHEMY_TRACK_MODIFICATIONS Based on the database I had created, I then created a class containing variables that would act as a representation of the columns in the table I created. __tablename__ = user_ids = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key = )
    date_col = db.Column(db.DateTime, default = datetime.now(), nullable= )
    key_words = db.Column(db.String( ))
    counter = db.Column(db.Integer()) : class table_name (db.Model) 'table_name' True False 64000 From my research it is convention for the class to have the same name as that of your table. I then specified the datatypes for each variable, adding a default value in the instance where I deemed that fit. For example in my instance I thought it would make sense for the timestamp to have the default value of the current time particularly since this is recording the time of a given interaction. The next step was building the actual flask app. There are quite a number of tutorials on building apps on that are better written. The most important starting point was defining a /bot endpoint that would listen to each incoming message from a given user that is received by Twilio. Flask @app.route('/bot', methods=['POST']) : def bot () With the help of the documentation I used the requests library to retrieve the number and input message from the sender. Twilio API for Whatsapp incoming_msg = request.values.get( , ).lower() number = request.values.get( , ) 'Body' '' #extract number 'From' '' I extracted the input message to check for certain keywords and to send the input message to my database. I also collected the sender's number to keep track of each person's interaction with the app. Each number contained some non numerical values. In order to clean this number for my database I used a regular expression operation to only include numerical values. cleaned_number = re.sub( , , number) '[^0-9]' '' Limiting number of requests per 24 hour period I wanted to cap the number of messages a user could send in a given day to limit the costs I might incur.  Each user would only be able to request 5 challenges in a 24 hour period.  However, not all requests are equal. The limit would have to exclude help requests for example. In this instance I only created three types of responses. One that would require reading some text and returning a random line from the text. For example if someone types in python easy they would get a random line from the text with the list of 'easy python challenges'. With this type of interaction I would also send the value 1 to the counter column in my table. file = urllib.request.urlopen(file_path)
        full_text = [line.decode( ).replace( , ) line file]
        chall = random.choice(full_text)
        challenge = .join(map(str, chall)) :
            msg.body(challenge)
            user_object = table_name()
            user_object.user_id = int(cleaned_number)
            user_object.key_words = incoming_msg
            user_object.counter = db.session.add(user_object)
            db.session.commit() :
            error = msg.body(error)
            user_object = table_name()
            user_object.user_ids = int(cleaned_number)
            user_object.key_words = incoming_msg
            user_object.counter = db.session.add(user_object)
            db.session.commit() : def action_control (file_path, incoming_msg) "utf-8" '\n' '' for in '' try 1 except 'Sorry, we ran into a mistake somewhere, this will not be added as an attempt. Please try again' 0 The second type of response would be a response where I would send the value 0 to the counter column, following a relatively similar logic with a few changes to factor in reading from a different file type. The third would be a message to factor in a scenario where a user types a keyword that is not recognized by the bot. Instead of rewriting this logic in multiple if statements it made a lot more sense to just create functions I could call in different if statements. For each interaction were the value 1 would be sent to the counter column I added an 'overarching' if statement that would check the total number of interactions a person had made in the last 24 hours before either sending the random challenge or a message indicating that the user had reached his/her limit. In order to check the total number of interactions I used flask-sqlalchemy to query from my database. total_interactions = Users.query.filter(table_name.user_id == cleaned_number).\
        filter(table_name.date_col <= current).\
        filter(table_name.date_col >= start).\
        filter(table_name.counter == ).count() 1 Note: I am using a different table and column names than what I actually used just to make it easier to follow. In this scenario I used user_id to represent the column with the sender's number. This is equivalent to filtering for user_ids where the phone number is the same as the current sender's number, additionally filtering where the date of the interaction is between 23 hours 59 minutes ago and now and the counter is equivalent to 1 (instances were the user made a request that would add to their counter). I would then return the total count of the rows returned from this  'script'. Lastly, in order to deploy the app to a server on the cloud I downloaded gunicorn which would run on top of my flask ask created the requirements from all the libraries I used in my virtual environment using pip freeze and voila. If you are keen to either help guide people using the app to solve random stats and programming challenges or are keen to have access to the bot feel free to reach out @ emmanuel@thegradientboost.com Would be keen to also get any feedback on the bot itself, and potential improvements.

TWILIO INC

twilio.com

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Since 2008

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TWILIO INC

twilio.com

5K-10K employees

Since 2008

COMPANY RANKING

TWILIO INC

EVERGREEN INDEX #11971

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