SMS in the Browser: An Adventure in WebSockets

A lot of the heavy lifting done by the Nexmo Messages API happens on the server-side. Messages are sent, received, processed and so on but usually all this activity is hidden away from end users of many of the applications that utilise the API. The display of these messages to the end user is handled by their respective applications or displayed in a browser using WebSockets API. To send an SMS from the browser with Nexmo's Messages API, a virtual phone number needs to be purchased and linked to the application. The client-side involves setting up a WebSocket connection to establish communication between the server and the browser, while the server-side involves setting up routes for handling incoming POST requests from Nexmo and utilizing Nexmo's Messages API to forward messages to recipients' phones. This tutorial covers the process of building a virtual phone in the browser that can send and receive SMS using Nexmo's Messages API.