Using the Twitter Gem
John Nunemaker has wrapped all the Twitter goodness of Ruby into a Gem called (aptly enough) twitter. Using this gem, making API requests to Twitter is even easier than using the twitter method. Perhaps more importantly, the Twitter gem also parses the output for you, and gives you a very easy interface to the data.
Installing the Twitter gem is the same as installing any other gem. It doesn't need any native extensions, so you can use it anywhere.
$ sudo gem install twitter
If we re-write our previous follow example, it comes out to just 20 lines including whitespace!
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'twitter'
twitter = Twitter::Base.new( 'aboutruby', 'pass123' )
last_id = 1
while true
timeline = twitter.timeline( :friends, :since_id => last_id )
unless timeline.empty?
last_id = timeline[0].id
timeline.reverse.each do|st|
puts "#{st.user.name} said #{st.text}"
end
sleep 300
end
end
The first step is to create the twitter object. Simply construct a Twitter::Base object and give it your username and password. No surprises there.
To request a timeline, such as the friends timeline, call the timeline method. If given no options, it will request the friends timeline. However, since we want to use the since_id option, we'll have to add the :friends parameter and the :since_id hash parameter. The rest of the code is straightforward. Note how easy it is to get information from the status updates. For example, to get the ID of the latest update, just do timeline[0].id!
Even simpler is the previous example that posts a new update. This progam is all of two meaningful lines.
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'twitter'
twitter = Twitter::Base.new( 'aboutruby', 'pass123' )
twitter.update ARGV[0]
For more information about the twitter gem, see its homepage and documentation.
