Oh. my. god. What a giant disaster.

I’ve been raving about how awesome Tropo is at handling SMSes to everyone I talk to, but no more. Tropo expects EVERY interaction to be the in the form of a response to a request that they’ve POSTed to your API endpoint.

Everything is part of a session THROUGH THEIR SERVER AND BACK TO YOUR CALLBACK URL. Want to send an SMS? First you need to create a session. Consider the Java library (in Scala):

val result = api.launchSession(token)
if (result.getSuccess) {
  api.message(...)
  ...
}

All valid, type-safe code. launchSession() returns a TropoLaunchResult, which indicates whether the session was successfully created and, if so, its session id.

We can work with this, right? WRONG! As part of the session creation Tropo will throw a session creation object at your callback URL:

00020	0000	11:22:41 PM   	ApplicationInstance[http://miogiro.pr1001.cloudbees.net/tropo.json , sas_2-15-sm1778xfp7g8g0dtropo] starts execution on Thread Tropo-Thread-3899e36f1ad7650f2848c3ac12332b96
00021	0000	11:22:41 PM   	Thread Tropo-Thread-3899e36f1ad7650f2848c3ac12332b96 acquired engine com.tropo.rest.engine.TropoScriptEngine@78ded0e7 of type tropo-web, activeEngines = 4
00022	0000	11:22:41 PM   	Sending TropoML Payload on Tropo-Thread-3899e36f1ad7650f2848c3ac12332b96 [url=http://miogiro.pr1001.cloudbees.net/tropo.json]: {"session":{"id":"3899e36f1ad7650f2848c3ac12332b96","accountId":"notsharing","timestamp":"2011-12-09T23:22:41.612Z","userType":"NONE","initialText":null,"callId":null,"parameters":{"token":"notsharing","action":"create"}}}
00023	0000	11:22:41 PM   	Received non-2XX status code on Tropo-Thread-3899e36f1ad7650f2848c3ac12332b96 [url=http://miogiro.pr1001.cloudbees.net/tropo.json, code=500]
00024	0000	11:22:41 PM   	Thread Tropo-Thread-3899e36f1ad7650f2848c3ac12332b96 returned engine com.tropo.rest.engine.TropoScriptEngine@78ded0e7 of type tropo-web, activeEngines = 3
00025	0000	11:22:41 PM   	ApplicationInstance[http://miogiro.pr1001.cloudbees.net/tropo.json , sas_2-15-sm1778xfp7g8g0dtropo] ends execution on Thread Tropo-Thread-3899e36f1ad7650f2848c3ac12332b96
00026	0000	11:22:41 PM   	sas_2-15-sm1778xfp7g8g0dtropo invalidated
00027	0000	11:22:41 PM   	Instance 3899e36f1ad7650f2848c3ac12332b96 removed

See what’s happening? If you fail to handle it and return a 200 status code (and a Tropo JSON verb?) it kills the session, never mind that I have no need for that. That means it’s literally impossible to send an SMS without a server setup to receive callback messages from Tropo. Oh, and of course you can only specify one URL: you’re supposed to route all the different requests based upon extra parameters you stick in the session creation requests.

It literally boggles the mind how someone could have thought this was a good idea.

Tropo, if you want to fix this and need help send me an email at peter@bubblefoundry.com. Tropo competitors, if you have a sane API to send SMS messages and callbacks to response to received messages (bonus points for a Scala or even Java library) and provide UK numbers that can handle both inbound and outbound SMS, feel free also to email me at peter@bubblefoundry.com.