benhutchinson / node-twitter-feed

Makers Academy : Week 7 : Node.js, Twitter API, Express Server

Integrating Node With The Twitter Feed

In this project, we began to extend our understanding of Node.js and NPM modules. Together with Attila, I decided to try to integrate the Twit NPM Module. This task deepened our understanding of the Twitter API, route parameters, and the Node Express Server package. We also learned how to return a JSON object and hence built a very simple API of our own.

###Twit Feed : Basic Functionality & Lessons Learned Twitter is integrated to take its search cue from a route parameter in the URI. For example, twitter/bbc would return tweets labelled "bbc" by Twitter. We have chosen to display the text from the most recently returned tweet on a page, along with the time and user ID number. In the course of testing with Mocha-Casper-JS, we learnt that the tweets Twitter returns do not solely depend on the content of the tweet. For example, a tweet from user @bbc could be returned, even if the tweet itself does not specifically mention the term "bbc." In addition, Twitter seems to check URI links such that a t.co/string link that ultimately points to bbc.com would also be returned. Our tests could be improved; for example, mocks/spies/doubles could be integrated.

###Twit Feed Online A working example can be found here. The feed is based on the "bbc" search parameter, as is shown in the URI. Another example can be found here. This feed instead is based on the "lufc" search parameter, also shown in the URI.

###Our API We built a very simple API allowing any user to reference our JSON hash. This can be visited here with the extract code from the server file as follows.

app.get('/jason', function(request, response){
  response.json({"attila": "legend", "beanie_hat": "the best"});
});

###Core Technologies

• Twit NPM Module
• Node.js
• Express Server
• EJS Templating
• jQuery & Javascript
• Basic HTML/CSS