Posting Twitter Updates using Java

As you may or may not know, I’m working on a Java based Twitter client recently. Sending and getting data from Twitter is really, really simple. Here is how to do it in Java.

Let’s assume that we are trying to post an update to twitter with the following data:

String username = "someone@example.com";
String password = "password";
String status = "Look! I'm twittering using Java";

Twitter uses basic HTTP authentication which requires you to send a username:password pair encoded in base64:

String cridentials = new sun.misc.BASE64Encoder().encode((username + ":" + password).getBytes());

Now let’s create a HTTP connection:

URL url = new URL("http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml");
URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();
conn.setDoOutput(true);

Authentication is activated like so:

conn.setRequestProperty ("Authorization", "Basic " + cridentials);

Now we can send the update by simply writing to conn’s output stream:

OutputStreamWriter wr = new OutputStreamWriter(conn.getOutputStream());
wr.write(data);
wr.flush();
wr.close();

Finally, if you wand you can grab and print out the XML response sent back to you by Twitter server:

BufferedReader rd = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream()));
String line, output = "";
while ((line = rd.readLine()) != null)
{
System.out.println(output);
}

That’s it – that’s all you need to do.

[tags]twitter, java, jtwitt, java twitter client, twitter client, twiter updates[/tags]