Asynchronous – a modern way of sending SMS
Asynchronous programming can help make applications and software more efficient and responsive, especially when they need to send bulk SMS.
Despite being around for a long time, asynchronous programming is experiencing a slight revival as more developers exploit its capabilities to improve the speed and performance of their applications and software. This is especially true when an application or software includes SMS and regularly sends out bulk text messages.
When you are sending bulk SMS ideally you want people to be able to continue working within the application or software rather than waiting until all the messages have been sent. You don’t really want the user to be held up waiting for a request to be executed, because if they have to stop they can’t do anything else.
In a synchronous environment, each request is processed one line at a time with the execution waiting until that function returns before continuing to the next line of code. Therefore, if an application starts sending 10,000 messages, it will stop the app doing most other things whilst it processes those messages and sends them out. A time-consuming task.
With asynchronous, however, you can keep things moving all the time as the process basically runs in the background enabling you to carry on processing within your application whilst it’s sending messages. This is the reason why it tends to be used in web development.
Anyone developing an app will run it from a web server which will utilise a number of threads that loop around servicing requests. With asynchronous programming the execution runs separately from a primary application thread allowing other code to be executed. When the application now calls the API of an SMS service to send text messages it doesn’t have to wait until those messages are sent, it simply returns and informs the app that it can take in another web request.
Asynchronous programming is useful for maintaining functionality in an application rather than creating a bottleneck in the application’s resources waiting on a request, therefore making web servers and applications much more efficient and responsive.
The only issue with asynchronous programming is that it won’t work with older applications that have been developed with synchronous programming. The application or software has to be asynchronous as well.
Having said that, any new applications or software will benefit hugely from using asynchronous code if they are going to be sending out bulk SMS and performing multiple tasks.
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