Developing SMS-based Services in erlang

[Enrique Marcote Peña]

Thank you very much for your answers, I'm gathering lots of information from
your emails, but on the other hand I should probably say that this is kind of
getting out of hand for me.  When I first sent the message I've expected to
hear lot about GSM 03.39, SMPP 3.0, 3.3, 3.4, SMPPP ...and instead of that,
SS7 and all that stuff came into play.

My first idea was to develop some kind of framework (pretty much like the
SMS-JDK http://www.ncl.ie/smsjdk/smsjdk.html) but open and erlang-based (I
thought that the result could be really neat, java is OK but has nothing to do
against erlang :-)   Then, from this framework on, I shall try to develop the
service we have in mind (in erlang also).  Guess I must be missing many
aspects of the hole picture.

I must confess that for the moment I don't have a clear mind about all of this.

I don't even know the tools and equipment needed (besides OPT of course), in
fact this is what I'm trying to guess at the very first stage (We wouldn't
like to be wasting our time working on things that are already done).

What about SMPP 3.0, CAP II (Computer Access Protocol Number 2) and GIP? Are
they used for the same thing?  --- dialog between SMSC (Short Message Service
Centre) and ESME (External Short Message Entities) ---.

Besides this dialog with the SMSC, some operations like checking the balance of

prepaid customers, charging the service to the customer's telephone bill or
possible service restrictions must be accomplished in order to implement a
full operating version of almost any service,  is all of this handled  through
the SS7 stack? Do you think that it'll be possible to emulate or implement
these operations on a lab?  I've seen something about OMAP (Operators,
Maintenance and Administration Part of SS7)  is there where I need to get into
SS7?

As you can see, by the moment I don't have much more than a great excitement
about this project and I guess that time enough scheduled also (at least 20
moths,
full-time).  Besides of getting my job done, even if it implies a greater
effort for myself, I will appreciate any guiding/suggestion to face my work to
a wider/generic result in order to develop some "pieces" of software that
could be used by others on further and/or greater projects (such us Valentin´s
proposal).

Please be patient with me, I'm just trying to guess how these pieces fit all
together.  Thanks again.

Regards,

        Quique