After reviewing the strategy and determining the best way to design for the requirements, we have established the following mashup APIs that we will use for this chapter:
Google Spreadsheet and/or EditGrid for the user to store and share the contacts information
Clickatell to send SMS messages
Interfax to send faxes
The APIs in this chapter have free developer trial accounts so you can experiment with them a bit. However, the APIs we are using in this chapter are not free for full commercial use and they have some restrictions on their usage.
We will not be using any specific Ruby libraries for this mashup as the APIs we use doesn't require them. Instead we will be using standard Ruby libraries that are available out of the box from any Ruby installation, in particular the Net::HTTP module, which allows us to connect to XML-RPC web services and REST-based HTTP APIs. We will also use the built-in CSV module to simplify conversion of CSV formatted data into arrays.
Let...