Overview

SuperReceptionist is a cloud PBX- a hosted business phone system - that allows you to record, route, forward and track every call that any business makes or receives. It is designed to ensure critical calls are not missed in the course of doing business. Other features include call forwarding, recording, missed call marketing, click-to-call and international virtual numbers. Hassle free installations, quick setup, low maintenance, rapid scaling capability makes it every entrepreneurs dream product.

You don't need a call center or an expensive EPABX machine or even employees working in two shifts just to answer calls. You only need a SuperReceptionist phone number.

Using the SuperReceptionist APIs:

  • You can make outgoing calls to phones .
  • You can receive notifications (in JSON form) for incoming/outgoing calls to the SuperReceptionist number. For example, you can consume these notifications to show a browser popup for the incoming call with the actual customer name etc that you can retrieve from a contact database or CRM.

Since the API is based on REST principles, it’s very easy to write and test applications. You can use your browser to access URLs, and pretty much any HTTP client in any programming language to interact with the API.

How REST can be useful

REST is an architectural style that uses simple HTTP calls for inter-machine communication instead of more complex options like CORBA, COM+, RPC, or even SOAP. Using REST means your calls will be message-based and reliant on the HTTP standard to describe these messages. Using the HTTP protocol means REST is a simple request/response mechanism. Each request returns a subsequent response. Requests are made up of a verb (POST, in this example), headers that describe the message, and a body (Hello World, in this example). The request is a message that describes what you want the server to accomplish. Likewise, the response consists of three pieces: a status code (200), headers describing the response and the body itself.

HTTP Verbs describe the type of operation:

  • GET: Retrieve a resource
  • POST: Create a resource
  • PUT: Update a resource
  • DELETE: Delete a resource

On the Web, the most common verb is GET. This is because the main purpose of a Web page's function is to request different resources that make up a page. In REST-based APIs, we leverage these verbs to describe the types of operations we want. It works because you're not tying your API to your client-side technology. You could imagine that this API is accessible from a client-side Web project, an iOS app, an IoT device and even a Windows Phone. This allows you to build the infrastructure for your organization with fewer worries about the longer-term marrying to a particular client-side stack. The server lives longer than the client. It always does.