Spring Integration with Twitter: How to Receive Tweets From Your Twitter Account

In my previous post on Spring Integration with Twitter, we have seen “How to post tweets to your Twitter Account using Spring Integration“.

In this post, I will show you how to receive the tweets from your Twitter Account.

If you were to run this example, you might have to pick the remaining missing configuration for logger etc from my previous post as mentioned above.

Spring Configuration

The Spring Configuration for receiving a Twitter update is shown below

twitter-inbound.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
    xmlns:int="http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:twitter="http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/twitter"
    xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/twitter
 
http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/twitter/spring-integration-twitter.xsd
 
 
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
 
 
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
 
 
http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration
 
 
http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/spring-integration.xsd
 
 
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context
 
 
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context.xsd">
 
    <context:property-placeholder location="/twitter.properties" />
 
    <context:component-scan base-package="com.skilledmonster.spring.integration.twitter" />
 
    <int:channel id="twitterInbound" />
 
    <int:service-activator input-channel="twitterInbound"
        ref="twitterMessageConsumer" />
 
    <twitter:inbound-channel-adapter
        channel="twitterInbound" twitter-template="twitterTemplate">
        <int:poller fixed-rate="5000" max-messages-per-poll="5" />
    </twitter:inbound-channel-adapter>
 
</beans>

The inbound-update-channel-adapter is configured with the same twitter-template to send the Twitter update message to the twitterInbound channel. A poller element is required to pull the messages from the Twitter server every 5 seconds. A maximum of 5 messages are pulled everytime the server is polled for the messages.

Service Activator

The Service Activator class is used to receive the Twitter message as shown below

package com.skilledmonster.spring.integration.twitter;
 
import org.apache.log4j.Logger;
import org.springframework.integration.Message;
import org.springframework.integration.annotation.ServiceActivator;
import org.springframework.social.twitter.api.Tweet;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;
 
/**
 * Twitter Message Consumer using the Service Activator
 * @author Jagadeesh
 *
 */
@Component
public class TwitterMessageConsumer {
 
    private static Logger LOG = Logger.getLogger(TwitterMessageConsumer.class);
 
    @ServiceActivator
    public void consume(Message<Tweet> message) {
        // get message payload
        Tweet tweet = message.getPayload();
        // log the received tweets
        LOG.info("Fetched Tweet Text from @" + tweet.getFromUser()+" # " + tweet.getText() );
    }
}

Test Run

All that is required to run the Twitter inbound message example is to load the Spring Configuration file

package com.skilledmonster.spring.integration.twitter;
 
import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext;
 
import org.springframework.context.support.ClassPathXmlApplicationContext;
/**
 * Twitter Inbound class to pull the messages for the Twitter server
 * @author Jagadeesh
 *
 */
public class TwitterInbound {
 
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        ApplicationContext context = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("/twitter-inbound.xml");
 
        Thread.sleep(5 * 60 * 1000);
    }
}

A five-minute delay is added to the code to wait for any new tweets

References:

Spring Integration Documentation