5 essential tools to jumpstart your Bandwidth application platform application development

After making a few applications with Bandwidth’s awesome Application Platform I have come across a set of tools that makes getting started with the Bandwidth Application Platform super easy.

Bandwidth’s Own Resources

The first place to start is our own doc site. Everything needed to get started developing your first Bandwidth Application Platform application is listed here.

Check out the ‘Getting Started’ guide to get set up with a phone number and start making simple requests to send messages and place phone calls.

Hit up the Rest API Documentation to get an idea on how to programmatically control everything from MMS, SMS, Conference Calls, Number Allocation, and simple Phone Calls.

Then, check out the SDKs for some of the most popular programming languages. The SDKs make it super easy to control the Bandwidth Application Platform.  We’re constantly adding more languages and functionality. It’s ALMOST as simple as copy/paste.

ngrok – Testing your application locally

One of my favorite tools when developing with Bandwidth’s Application Platform. Ngrok is a simple application that runs in a terminal window that forwards requests from an external website to localhost. No more configuring port forwarding or dealing with IT staff to receive essential webhooks that drive most applications.

Even further, ngrok provides a list of all requests received and a playback function that will simulate the request again. ngrok has saved me countless hours when debugging specific callbacks and developing applications.

Postman– Make HTTP requests easy

Certainly not the only option to make simple HTTP requests, but postman is my go-to program.  Postman does much more than just keep track of request history.  It provides collections to group types of requests together, import/export functionality to share collections with others, and can even intercept requests through a browser.

Postman is useful when learning the Bandwidth Application Platform API. Need to send a message? Just play around with the functionality from postman. Need to figure out what went wrong? Just make a simple http request to the error end point.  Postman is also incredibly useful to test local applications (in combination with requestbin). Grab the request from requestbin and copy/paste into postman to help debug the application.

Bandwidth Open Source Demo Applications

Not only does Bandwidth provide great SDKs, we provide some starter sample applications to show just how easy it is to work with the Bandwidth Application Platform.  The number of Demo Applications are growing substantially as we continue to build applications internally and post them for the world to use.

Checkout some samples for

• PHP – https://github.com/Bandwidth/php-bandwidth-examples
• CSharp – https://github.com/Bandwidth/csharp-bandwidth-examples
• Python – https://github.com/Bandwidth/python-bandwidth-examples

And even:

• Android – https://github.com/BandwidthExamples/catapult-reference-app-voice-android
• iOS – https://github.com/BandwidthExamples/catapult-reference-app-voice-ioss

Signing up for the Bandwidth Application Platform

f for some reason you don’t already have an account to get started with the Bandwidth Application Platform, simply fill out the form here and one of our awesome support staff will get you set up in no time!