Check out yowsup
https://github.com/tgalal/yowsup
Yowsup is a python library that allows you to do all the previous in your own app. Yowsup allows you to login and use the Whatsapp service and provides you with all capabilities of an official Whatsapp client, allowing you to create a full-fledged custom Whatsapp client.
A solid example of Yowsup's usage is Wazapp. Wazapp is full featured Whatsapp client that is being used by hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Yowsup is born out of the Wazapp project. Before becoming a separate project, it was only the engine powering Wazapp. Now that it matured enough, it was separated into a separate project, allowing anyone to build their own Whatsapp client on top of it. Having such a popular client as Wazapp, built on Yowsup, helped bring the project into a much advanced, stable and mature level, and ensures its continuous development and maintaince.
Yowsup also comes with a cross platform command-line frontend called yowsup-cli. yowsup-cli allows you to jump into connecting and using Whatsapp service directly from command line.