Some things need to consider are the call back URL and the access type. Basically call back URL will be the production level URL of your application not your local host. If you want to use Twitter for authentication, then on successful authentication your call back URL will be invoked. Access type is the operations that your app is going to do. Read-only mode is that you only want the read access. And in Read-Write mode you can send tweets and can do other operations.

And I assume that you people know how Twitter authenticates. I am telling here in steps.

1. You app will generate a URL with unique access token
2. Your visitor will click on that URL, which will take your the Twitter web. Where he could allow your app to access or deny
3. On if he allows your app, he will be asked to enter his Twitter user name and password
4. And on successful authentication, Twitter will take user to your web. By calling your mentioned call back URL

Concidel.com - Concieve Ideas & Deliver

But recently a friend queried about it and I again had a search on it and come up with two free Twitter clients.

Snaptu

Snaptu is Java based funbox. If you phone is Java enabled, it can be installed. More than just Twitter client, it contains every thing that we need to used on Internet on daily basis. Name any social networking or daily use site, they have them on it. Almost every popular site is available as a widget, which can be added to Snaptu. The Twitter interface is very clean. To download Snaptu to your phone, point the browser of your mobile phone to this URL: m.snaptu.com

TweetS60

TweetS60 is Symbian based applicatin. Available in .sisx file with just size of 110 Kb. Very sleek interface with basic features of tweeting. You need to signin for only once and the thing I like over Snaptu is you can set Internet access point. It means you didnt need to select your Internet access point every time it refreshed. You can download TweetS60 from here.

I have decided to keep both applications on my phone. I will use TweetS60 for Twitter and will use Snaptu for other Internet needs. Like cricket score, weather, images and calandar etc.

If you like this post, you may also interested to read essential softwares of Symbian S60 phones.

According to Google support:

I’d like to map my app to http://myurl.com (also known as a naked domain).

Due to recent changes, Google App Engine no longer supports mapping your app to a naked domain. If your domain registrar supports URL redirects, you can redirect from http://yourdomain.com to your app, which can be served from domains like http://www.yourdomain.com or http://appid.yourdomain.com.

For instructions on how to configure a redirect for your Google Apps domain, please see the article on URL forwarding.

Issue can be resolved if Google provides us IP address and we set a A record pointing to that IP address. But they dont.

If you guys have idea how naked domain can be configured with this URL Forwarding thing please feel free to share. I will also update if I got this problem resolved.

Helpful resources:

• Forwarding to a website while using GApps
• How to use Google app engine with my own domain (not subdomain)?

Case
I am developing a Twitter application and I got this exception when I login my Twitter user name. I have some 120 friends and 170 followers. So I need to fill two lists of Twitter users with their name and image URL. It was a bad practice from my side that I started populating lists in a loop which contain external service lookup overhead (Twitter) and also big in iteration. So I got following exception.
This request (670f658c2bf64b44) started at 2009/10/02 23:18:23.902 UTC and was still executing at 2009/10/02 23:18:52.605 UTC.

Possible solution
As for those users who have friends and followers in thousands, this problem will persist. So what I am thinking is to put lists in session. Populate the page with first 30 users. And give a link to next 30 (paginate). I will keep updating two variables in session which will tell start and end to pick the users from the list. I will use DWR for this. By this my every request will be responded by container with in 30 seconds.

If you guys have some more optimum solution for it, please share me. Another solution has been discussed here too.

Two weeks ago I click with a very basic idea and being as a matter of learning I started working on it. I have finished more than 80% of the work. I deployed the application on Google App Engine (I hope you are familiar with it). I used Twitter4J lib a Java wrapper for Twitter API.

If you are also interested in Twitter based app development in Jave, then this tutorial will be helpful for you. Feel free to add comments at the end of the post, I will love to reply.

Things you require for development

• Eclipse IDE
• Google App Engine SDK
• A Twitter account
• Twitter4J API

Things you need to know before you start

Oauth authentication

You should know Oauth basics and its terminologies. You can little google on it or read this FAQs

Register an App with Twitter

You need to register an application on this URL: http://twitter.com/oauth. Please take care of two things. The call back URL will not be your localhost URL. It should be a valid web address. And while choosing Default Access Type, if your application need to do changes or send tweets then you should choose Read & Write otherwise/if you just want to do readonly operations then leave Read-only checked.

A little bit about Google App Engine

Google App Engine is cloud based hosting environment. You should read on their web or on a post by me.

Steps for any Twitter App

1. User is on your website
2. Generate a token
3. Have a hyperlink and take user to the Twitter from your website for authentication
4. User will enter its user name and passeword and press allow
   If user’s credentials authentiecated Twitter will call the callback method which you had mentioned. Note that localhost URLs will not work here. You need mentiona a valid web address which will be invoked when user will be authenticated.

Code Section

I will assume that you have developed a helloworld prject in Google App Engine and deployed it on appspot.com domain. Code snippet is available in 2 servlets and 1 jsp page.

LoginServlet.java

Twitter twitter = new Twitter();
twitter.setOAuthConsumer(Constants.CONSUMER_KEY,
Constants.CONSUMER_SECRET);
RequestToken requestToken  = twitter.getOAuthRequestToken();

String token = requestToken.getToken();
String tokenSecret = requestToken.getTokenSecret();

HttpSession session = request.getSession();
session.setAttribute("token", token);
session.setAttribute("tokenSecret", tokenSecret);

String authUrl = requestToken.getAuthorizationURL();

request.setAttribute("authUrl", authUrl);
RequestDispatcher rd = request.getRequestDispatcher("login.jsp");
rd.forward(request, response);

Consumer key and secrets will be generated when you register an application with Twitter. You need to keep token information into session so that you can use the token when callback URL will be called. authUrl is a link which will take user to the Twitter website for authentication. And if authentication successful it will call your URL mentioned as callback.

login.jsp

<a href='<%=request.getAttribute("authUrl") %>'>Sign in with Twitter</a>

HomeServlet.java (as callback URL)

Twitter twitter = new Twitter();
HttpSession session = request.getSession();

twitter.setOAuthConsumer(Constants.CONSUMER_KEY,
Constants.CONSUMER_SECRET);
AccessToken accessToken = twitter.getOAuthAccessToken(
(String) session.getAttribute("token"), (String) session
.getAttribute("tokenSecret"));
twitter.setOAuthAccessToken(accessToken);

User user = twitter.verifyCredentials();

HomeServlet is your callback. Let say you have mentioned URL mapping of this servlet as /Home. So you mention http://.appspot.com/Home in callback field in your app registeration page at twitter. And this HomeServlet will be called. Now you have the user object to play with. See Twitter4J javadocs for more help.

WEB-INF/appengine-web.xml

<sessions-enabled>true</sessions-enabled>

You need to add this tag in you appengine-web.xml file that you are enabling the session.

So this was a tutorial, feel free to ping me on it. If you stuck somewhere. We will both look into it.

I also suggest following links to you people to must visit them. They helps me a lot in the understanding and the development. I will update this tutorial if got more things to discuss.

Helpful Links

• How to Register an App with Twitter for OAuth
• Writing Your First Twitter Application with OAuth
• Quick and Dirty Twitter4j OAuth for Web Apps
• Finding a Web Solution for Twitter4j: Results of Session Solution

Most of the times when some techie (my colleague or any friend) asked me “what is blogging?” or “how blogging can help us”. I just got attentive and its my time to sell my stuff I started narrating the benefits of writing blogs. I have come up with many developers who are writing code for years but didn’t know about this Internet revolution. I have convinced and influenced some of my friends and colleagues to start writing technical blogs. And now they feel the difference. They have their own identity to speak with the world, and now they think something innovative about the areas they are expert and they write.

How blogging helps

Actually blogging is some sort of “Self Realization” for any developer. Like you share some idea, utility code or wrote any tutorial on your blog and you like people commenting on your stuff and talking about yourself.You are extending your socio-technical circle. That can help in your career. Also from the prospective of employer too. In good organizations those developers are preferred who can give technical judgment on things they are doing. And for that purpose people do blog to extend their knowledge breath wise.

My primary purpose for blogging was to have a reference of some code snippets that are helpful in day to day programming. And to give my personal opinion and judgment on software development and other tech-industrial things. I daily spent two hours on reading different technology and programming blogs to keep my knowledge up to date. As in our industry things keep on evolving so its should be an integral part of our work to keep our self intact with the latest knowledge.

Why programmers cant blog

Because programmers are found little moderate in verbal and communication skills. If they can write unbreakable logics why the there is problem to write it down somewhere. Programmers usually lack this aptitude. Those guys read technical blogs, knows ‘CodingHorror’. Let me quote one thing from there.

Technical programming skills are certainly important. But general writing and communication skills are far, far more important. Even if you’re merely a humble programmer.

Jeff Atwood

I have wrote a related post on non-cs skills that every programmer must have. This point is discussed there in detail.

Keep blogging and have fun.

Now you will have options to sync music, TV shows, podcasts and movies. Also it contains the fix which iPhone user faced to save trimmed videos as new clips. This update contains locking for phone too.

It also contain following features:

• App update-ability through iTunes
• Increase battery power
• Fixes about iPhone SMS vulnerability problems from iPhone OS 3.0.1
• Downloading ring-tones wirelessly from iTune store

You can download the firmware from Apple’s website.

Picture reference: oracle.com/features/suncustomers.html

By using Meme you can post videos, music and pictures and they will shown straight away in your time-line. Twitter provides excellent idea to Yahoo to think about it and come up with more innovation. This Yahoo startup can cause shutdown twitter. Its looking. Twitter is still facing its up time issues.

Currently Meme is invitation based. I recently joined it on the invitation of @anasimtiaz. If you guys want to be in, leave comments here I will send you invitation. You guys can follow me on Meme (tahirakram) and/or Twitter (@tahirakram). But I have decided to continue using Twitter for my primary micro-blogging needs.