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

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

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

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);
    }
}

References:

Spring Integration Documentation