There's been an increase in talk about Twitter lately, so I decided to try my hand at building a simple client that displays Twitter messages in Flex. Turns out, it was even easier than I thought, so I'll share it in a quick blog entry.
I used an HTTPService with the resultFormat set to e4x to get the status information. In the result handler, I set the result to an XML object. Twitter.com has some very comprehensive documentation that cover all the service call APIs and return types here:
http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+API+Documentation
To display the Twitter statuses, I used an inline item renderer inside a List control. Simple to do and it looks good for a minimum amount of effort.
You need a proxy page that requests data from Twitter, since Twitter.com does not have an open crossdomain.xml file. In this case, we have an ASP.NET server available with an open crossdomain file, so my proxy page (twit.aspx) is written in C# and put up on that server. I am more familiar with PHP server-side code, so it was a little tricky to get the C# syntax right.
My ASPX syntax uses the System.Net.WebClient.DownloadData() method to do the same thing that the file_get_contents() PHP function does.
If you have a PHP server, there's already an example written in PHP that you can also look at:
http://www.blackcj.com/blog/tag/cross-domain-xml/
Twitter statuses are sent out every 60 seconds, so I used a timer that calls send() on the HTTPService every 60 seconds. This is configurable, too, but there's no point in making the updates shorter than 60 seconds, according to the Twitter documentation.
This example is currently set up so you can use the twit.aspx page on aspexamples.adobe.com as a test page. You just pass a username to it with a GET request, setting the p parameter to the username you want to track. In my example, I hardwired my Twitter address so you can see it running, but you can put any username in there that you want when you build your own client. Please don't use the service for production reasons, or we'll have to lock it down.
Download the files mentioned in this article:
Download file (2K)
Enjoy!
