Zhao Lu (aka @zlu) has shared a tutorial he has done using Ruby on Rails and our recently released Tropo Web API. The tutorial shows how to add, or build, the Tropo features to your Rails application in 15 minutes using our REST/JSON API. All of this deployed to Heroku for easy application deployment.

Another great thing that Zhao goes on to show, is the ability to use the Tropo Web API behind a firewall where you can not open or forward ports. For this he shows using Tunnlr to establish a remote SSH tunnel. With this tunnel you obtain a port on Tunnlr’s public IP address that forwards via your SSH tunnel to your application inside your firewall. This is great when you are on a company or university network where opening and forwarding a port through a firewall is not an option.

For more details have a look at the README. The full source code example is available on Github @ http://github.com/zlu/tropo-tutorial. A big thanks to Zhao for showing how easy it is to use the Tropo Web API!