Send SMS via SMPP with camel

Question

What's the best strategy to send SMS via SMPP with Camel ? Should I use the ProducerTemplate ?

I'm new to camel so I'm not confident if my strategy is the best.

In my application upon reception of an SMS, I have to send back an other SMS with some computed content.

I created a route smsIn that looks like this

from "uri=smpp ..."
unmarshal ref="bindyDataFormat"
to "uri=bean:myBean

and a route smsOut with

from "uri=direct:smsOut"
to "uri=smpp ..."

The smsIn route, receives the sms, transforms its conent (csv data) in a pojo and send that pojo to myBean.

In myBean I do some processing and then call a ProducerTemplate which send my computed message to the endpoint "direct:smsOut".

The reason I use the producerTemplate is that I have to set some info from my pojo in the header (CamelSmppDestAddr) and the body of the Exchange.

I have tested with the logica SMSC simulator, this seems to work fine, but would like to have your opinion about this solution ?

What about reliability , transaction ? Should I store my message before trying to send it to the SMSC ? Should I store it in a database, post it to a queue ?

Petter Nordlander Petter Nordlander · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-08T04:58:21

I'm not sure why you have a producer template, you could just build up the route instead (given that you return something from your bean or takes an Exchange as paramter).

<from uri="smpp: ..."/>
  <bean ref="bean:myBean"/>
  <to uri="jms:queue:myQueue"/>

then not use direct, but use a JMS queue that is transactional and persistent. Say your smpp call fails, the message would have been gone. Using a queue like this and make sure its transactional, you can make sure not to lose data in this stage of the route.

 <from uri="jms:queue:myQueue"/>
   <transactional/>
   <to uri="smpp.."/>

I suggest using Apache ActiveMQ as JMS middleware. Actually, if you download ActiveMQ, you get camel bundled, so you could actually run your Camel routes from ActiveMQ.

You might want to tweak how retries and error handling occurs dependent on what you want to happen (retry every second forever?, retry five times, then put to error queue? etc). Read this page: Transaction Error handling in Camel

For deeper info and more tweaks, you might also want to read this: Transactional Client

Send SMS via SMPP with camel

1 Answers