Tweet Stream library

Library and Tool Development

jona.no

in Library and Tool Development • 3 years ago

Tweet Stream is an amazing library for making processing work with twitter.

starting from the given example the library is easy to adapt

TweetStream s = new TweetStream(this, "stream.twitter.com", 80, "1/statuses/filter.json?follow=12", "user", "pwd");

a list of search parameters on twitter you can find here:

http://dev.twitter.com/pages/streaming_api_methods

so coming to my question:

If there are no new messages for a while there is a SocketTimeoutException. and after that the library is waiting for some time to reconnect (sleeping time).

couldn't connect to http://stream.twitter.com:80/1/statuses/filter.json?follow=12: java.net.SocketTimeoutException: Read timed out
reconnect failed. sleeping for 1000 ms before attempting next reconnect

1000ms would be no problem, but if there's no new tweet coming in for some time the sleeping time automatically adds up to a long time to reconnect.

well what i want to achieve is that my app checks twitter continuously (at least something like every 2 seconds on a regular base). i think i have to control either the socketTimeoutMs so it stays connected longer or i should get control of the increasing sleeping time.

i tried

s.socketTimeoutMs = 200000;

throws an error

The field TweetStream.socketTimeOutMs is not visible

any suggestions?

Replies(6)

doodle

Re: Tweet Stream library

3 years ago

modify the value in the source file or set the type from private to public

PhiLho

Re: Re: Tweet Stream library

3 years ago

Meaning, if that was not clear to the original poster, that they need to recompile the library...
One can also use reflection to bypass the restricted access. In theory (I haven't tried this trick yet).

doodle

Re: Tweet Stream library

3 years ago

Thats a great situation for the use of reflection. I will have to add that to my programming ninja bag.

jona.no

Re: Tweet Stream library

3 years ago

thanks a lot for the answers.
i thought there might be something simpler than changing and recompiling the library, but anyway it turned out not to be that difficult as i thought. i had no idea how to even create a .jar file so i thought i had to use eclipse and then there were these .scala files which confused me and i tried to figure that out and time passed... well anyway i made it and finally i could change my variable. now i am testing with a longer connection time....

well for those who want to play with the library and don't know much about library development... here's a how-to:
(mac os x - but i guess it's more or less the same on any plattform)
1. download and unzip the source - http://github.com/mccv/processing-tweet-stream
2. download and install scala - http://www.scala-lang.org/downloads/distrib/files/scala-2.8.0.final-installer.jar
3. open and edit build.xml (you have to fill in your own locations for processing and scala)
also i had some troubles here with relative and absolute paths. if you get any error messages try to put the absolute path
(happened to me for example at line 72 ./resources/ didn't work so i changed to /Users/username/......./resources)
4. you're prepared now for compiling. so this is the point where you can make your changes in TweetStream.scala (mccv-processing-tweet-stream-20ed13c/src/main/scala/com/twitter/processing/)
5. run terminal and change directory to the downloaded folder (mccv-processing-tweet-stream-20ed13c)
6. type "ant" + ENTER
7. congratulations the library has been rebuilt!
8. in the newly created distribution folder you find tweet_stream.zip unzip and put the tweet_stream folder into your Processing library folder .../Processing/libraries/

Maybe there is a better way to do it. I am not a PRO at all, but that's the way I could achieve something. I hope this might be useful for somebody else as well.

the reflection thing also looks quite interesting. i might have a look into that a bit later...