RapidSMS

An open source package of useful tools that extend the Django web development framework to support processing text messages. It includes:

• A framework for writing code to be invoked when a text message is received and respond to it
• A set of backends - pluggable code modules that can interface to various ways of connecting your Django program to the phone network to pass text messages back and forth
• Sample applications
• Documentation

The backends are required because unlike email, there's no universal standard for sending and receiving text messages over the Internet. Often we get access to the messages via a third party vendor, like Twilio or Tropo, that provides a proprietary interface. RapidSMS isolates us from the differences among vendors.

RapidSMS is open source, under the BSD license, with UNICEF acting as holder of the contributors' agreements (granting a license for RapidSMS to use and distribute their contributions). See the RapidSMS license for more about this.

• RapidSMS builds on Django, our favorite web development framework.
• RapidSMS is at the right level for us. It provides components that we can use to build our own applications the way we need to, and the flexibility to customize its behavior.
• RapidSMS is open source, under the BSD license. There are no issues with our use of it, and we are free to extend it when we need to for a particular project. We then have the opportunity to contribute our changes back to the RapidSMS community.
• RapidSMS is vendor-neutral. We can build our applications without being tied to any particular vendor of text messaging services. That's good for multiple reasons:
• We don't have to pick a vendor before we can start.
• We could change vendors in the future without having to rewrite the applications.
• We can deploy applications to different countries that might not have any common vendor for messaging services.