• By Wilson Mazaiwana
• In Developers
• Posted Sep 29, 2016

SMSJuice APIs Introduction - What is an API?

API is an acronym for Application Programming Interface.

This is tech talk for a channel enabling a system to provide services to an external application.

Okay, let’s use a real world service like a bank as an illustration. If you want banking services, you go to the bank and speak to a bank teller or an advisor about the services you need. However there are other services that you really want to do more often but can’t be going to the bank every time you want to do them, otherwise you would have to go numerous times a day and it leaves you with no time to do your own work. So, to make it easier for you, the bank has provided a way, or a channel, or an interface, on which you can do numerous bank tasks without actually going to the bank. The banks like to call it internet banking, where you can do all the admin tasks on your bank accounts like

• sending money,
• receiving money,
• viewing your balance,
• setting up direct debits and standing orders,

Now, with that example given, you can take SMSJuice as your text messaging bank, which you can go to if you want to send messages and manage contacts etc… However, SMSJuice now provides an interface, just like the bank, on which you can

• send & receive messages,
• manage contacts,
• view your balance or how many credits left,
• view message status and analytics,
without frequently going to the SMSJuice website portal to do those tasks every time you need to. This interface that we provide is what we call an API, which lets your software application or service access SMSJuice text messaging “bank” to do the tasks which you would have needed to login and do manually.

SMSJuice provides 3 types of APIs

1. Email to SMS API - where you send an email and it is turned into SMS to the intended recipient
2. HTTP API - where your software/application manages your account (send/receive messages, manage contacts, check balance/credit) using the internet
3. SMPP API - an interface which can send millions of messages per day using our service.



At SMSJuice we provide developer APIs at competitive prices. To get a free trial signup here and get 20 free messages to try out with our developer API.