Using twitter4j with Play! Framework and Secure Social is this easy

Brian PorterMarch 1st, 2013Last Updated: March 2nd, 2013

0 23 1 minute read

During yesterday’s personal Hackathon, I started a project which I might introduce here sometime. But the coolest revelation was (again) how easy it was to get up and running.

Create a new Play Project
Add Secure Social and configure it for Twitter, and use the InMemoryUserService from the examples. (all this is described here http://securesocial.ws/guide/getting-started.html and only takes a minute)
Add the dependecy to twitter4j to your Build.scala like this:

1
'org.twitter4j'% 'twitter4j-core'% '3.0.3'

Secure your controller action method to force the (Login) Authentication with Twitter. Remember — because you are using the InMemoryUserService none of the Authentication data is stored — you will have to reconnect each time.
@SecureSocial.SecuredAction

I then added these standard methods to get the Authenticated Twitter User, Token, Secret and the twitter4J Connection: (The tokenSecret, token and current User are coming from the Secure Social Oauth1 Connection, and are used to authenticate the Twitter Connection.

public static Twitter getTwitterInstance() {
// The factory instance is re-useable and thread safe.
TwitterFactory factory = new TwitterFactory();
Twitter twitter = new TwitterFactory().getInstance();twitter.setOAuthConsumer(Play.application().configuration()
.getString('securesocial.twitter.consumerKey'), Play.application().configuration().getString('securesocial.twitter.consumerSecret'));
twitter4j.auth.AccessToken accessToken = new twitter4j.auth.AccessToken(token(), tokenSecret());
twitter.setOAuthAccessToken(accessToken);
return twitter;
}
public static String tokenSecret() {
String retval = '';
scala.collection.Iterator iterator = Application.getCurrentUser().oAuth1Info().iterator();
while (iterator.hasNext()) {
OAuth1Info oAuth1Info = iterator.next();
retval = oAuth1Info.secret();
}
return retval;
}
public static String token() {
String retval = '';
scala.collection.Iterator iterator = Application.getCurrentUser().oAuth1Info().iterator();
while (iterator.hasNext()) {
OAuth1Info oAuth1Info = iterator.next();
retval = oAuth1Info.token();
}
return retval;
}
public static Identity getCurrentUser() {
return (Identity) ctx().args.get(SecureSocial.USER_KEY);
}

Then I added some code in my Controller to list (for example) my Followers

long cursor = -1;
IDs ids;
System.out.println('Listing following ids.');
do {
ids = twitter.getFriendsIDs(cursor);
for (long id : ids.getIDs()) {
twitter4j.User twitterUser = twitter.showUser(id);
twitterUsers.put(twitterUser.getScreenName(), new TwitterUser(id,twitterUser));
System.out.println(id);
}
} while ((cursor = ids.getNextCursor()) != 0);