To use twitter data in my saas application, I was going to write my own custom Twitter client by doing a rest call. However, I found out Spring Boot offers a Twitter plugin that can be used to fetch Twitter data. Neat.

In this post, I will show some comparison of these two approaches and why one can choose over another:

Custom Twitter Client

So custom twitter client will be a standalone client which will build an HTTP entity with client secrets that are needed to authenticate with Twitter API. In this client, we will use restOperations to call API endpoint passing HTTP entity and the REST call will respond with Twitter Data Model.

This will look like below:

public TwitterDataModel getTwitterData(long accountId)
{
    String url = buildRestUrl(accountId);
    ParameterizedTypeReference<HashMap<Long, TwitterDataModel>> responseType = new ParameterizedTypeReference<HashMap<Long, TwitterDataModel>>(){};
    HttpEntity entity = buildHttpEntity(CLIENT_ID, CLIENT_SECRET);
    Map<Long, TwitterDataModel> twitterDataModelMap = restOperations.exchange(url, HttpMethod.GET, entity, responseType).getBody();

    Long keyForData = new Long(accountId);
    TwitterDataModel twitterDataModel = twitterDataModelMap.get(keyForData);

    return twitterDataModel;
}

public String buildRestUrl(long accountId)
{
    return TWITTER_REST_ENDPOINT + accountId + TWITTER_REST_API;
}

There is nothing much wrong with this approach, except the fact that we will have to write an extra TwitterDataModel business object. Also, this business model should be created before we do the actual REST call.

Spring Boot Twitter Plugin

To use this plugin, first, we need to add the plugin in Gradle or maven like below:

compile('org.springframework.social:spring-social-twitter')

Once we have this plugin, we can add an object of type Twitter in our code to call REST APIs.

This will look like below:

private final Twitter twitter;

public TwitterDataModel getTwitterData(long accountId)
    {
        String url = buildRestUrl(accountId);
        ParameterizedTypeReference<HashMap<Long, TwitterDataModel>> responseType = new ParameterizedTypeReference<HashMap<Long, TwitterDataModel>>(){};
        HttpEntity entity = buildHttpEntity(CLIENT_ID,CLIENT_SECRET);

        Map<Long, TwitterDataModel> twitterDataModelMap = twitter.restOperations().exchange(url, HttpMethod.GET, entity, responseType).getBody();

        Long keyForData = new Long(accountId);
        TwitterDataModel twitterDataModel = twitterDataModelMap.get(keyForData);

        return twitterDataModel;
    }

    public String buildRestUrl(long accountId)
    {
        return TWITTER_REST_ENDPOINT + accountId + TWITTER_REST_API;
    }

The major advantage of this plugin is that we can get the data in Twitter Data Model that twitter offers. An then we can go on to use to handle our data.

Conclusion

In this post, I showed how we can use a Spring Boot Twitter social plugin to gather Twitter data.