Overview

A Vonage API application contains the security and configuration information you need to connect to Vonage endpoints and use the Vonage APIs.

Each Vonage application created can support multiple capabilities - for example you can create an Application that supports using the Voice, Messages and RTC APIs.

To illustrate the use of Vonage applications, a brief summary for creating and using a Vonage voice application is given here:

1. Create a Vonage application using the CLI, the Dashboard or the Application API.
2. Make sure you configure your webhook URLs. Vonage will call back on these URLs with important information.
3. Associate a Vonage number with your Vonage application.
4. Write your web application. Implement the webhook endpoints you configured in step 2, using the Vonage APIs as required.

For instance, if you want to create an application that forwards inbound calls to a destination phone, you would perform the following steps:

1. You create a Vonage application that has voice capabilities.
2. You configure the answer and event webhook URLs.
3. You associate a Vonage number with your Vonage application.
4. You implement a web application that responds to callbacks on the webhook URLs.
5. When an inbound call is made to the Vonage number associated with the Vonage application, an NCCO is returned on the answer_url.

Other types of application, such as those with Messages and Dispatch capabilities, have a slightly different process which is described in the relevant sections of this documentation.

The following sections explain Vonage applications in more detail.

Structure

Each application has the following:

Capabilities

A Vonage application can use various APIs, including Voice, Messages and Dispatch, Conversation, and Client SDK.

When creating an application you can specify the capabilities you want your application to support. For each capability you can set webhooks depending on what capabilities you want, for example for an application with an rtc capability you could specify an event URL to receive RTC events. If your application also needed to use voice capabilities you could also potentially set an Answer URL to receive a call answered webhook, a fallback URL in case your Answer URL fails, and another Event URL to receive voice call related events.

A summary of capabilities is given in the following table:

Webhooks

The webhook URLs you provide when creating an application depend on the application capabilities required. The following table summarizes the webhooks:

Webhook types

The following table describes webhooks available per capability:

Webhook timeouts

For the voice capability only, you can set timeouts on webhooks. There are two timeouts that can be specified: connection_timeout and socket_timeout. These parameters apply to the answer, event, and fallback webhooks, and are specified in milliseconds. The following table provides further information:

When creating or updating an application these can be set directly, or updated as required, for example:

...
  "capabilities": {
    "voice": {
      "webhooks": {
        "answer_url": {
          "address": "https://example.com/webhooks/answer",
          "http_method": "POST",
          "connection_timeout": 500,
          "socket_timeout": 3000
        },
        "fallback_answer_url": {
          "address": "https://fallback.example.com/webhooks/answer",
          "http_method": "POST",
          "connection_timeout": 500,
          "socket_timeout": 3000
        },
        "event_url": {
          "address": "https://example.com/webhooks/event",
          "http_method": "POST",
          "connection_timeout": 500,
          "socket_timeout": 3000
        }
      }
    }
...

If these values are not specified when creating or updating the application, then default values are applied. The default values for these timeouts depend on the webhook concerned, as shown in the following table:

There is further explanation of webhook timeouts in the webhook documentation.

Creating applications

There are four main ways to create an application:

1. In the Vonage Dashboard. Applications are then listed in the your applications section of the Dashboard.
2. Using the Nexmo CLI.
3. Using the Application API.
4. Using one of the Vonage Server SDKs.

Managing applications using the CLI

• Managing applications using the Nexmo CLI

Code Snippets

• Create an Application
• List Applications
• Get an Application
• Update Application
• Delete an Application

Reference

• Application API