If you are a developer of telephone applications, there has never been a more varied and powerful array of tools at your disposal to do your work than right now.
If your not a phone app developer, but always wanted to be (believe me when I say that chicks dig fellas that can build phone apps), the traditional barriers between web applications and phone applications have never been as blurred as they are right now. If you have the basic tools and skills needed to build solid web applications, you can quickly and easily add a phone interface to your code.
A new service for building phone applications that embodies this blurriness between the worlds of traditional web applications and phone applications was unveiled recently – Cloudvox. Cloudvox makes building phone applications dead simple. Here’s how.
Cloudvox is built on the open source Asterisk platform, so all of the existing tools available to Asterisk developers (PHPAGI, Adhearsion, Asterisk-Java) are available to Cloudvox developers.
What makes Cloudvox exciting is that it removes the need to build, host and manage an Asterisk server (or servers, depending on the scale of your app). If you’ve ever thought about standing up an Asterisk server just so you could build a killer phone application, then Cloudvox is worth a look. They provide an easy to use interface for managing applications (application code is still deployed on your server) and reviewing call statistics. They take the work out of building an Asterisk-based phone app, and leave all of the fun stuff (writing the actual code) to you. But wait, there’s more.
The team at Cloudvox has also deployed an API that lets you build phone apps with nothing but JSON and HTTP. Lots of platforms strive to be language agnostic and embrace developers of all stripes, but this takes it to a new level. If your language of choice can speak HTTP and supports JSON, you get an invite to the party.
The Cloudvox management interface also lets you register SIP phones (physical ones and softphones too), so that you can direct callers from an application to an extension that will ring wherever your SIP phone is currently registered from. You can also use the registered extension to make outbound phone calls.
There is a lot to like about Cloudvox. If you’re a phone application developer, or ever wanted to be one, it is worth your time to check this new service out.