================================== HIPAGES TWITTER APP

Internship Challenge

By Peter Noordijk

================================== TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Functionalities
Backend technology
Frontend technology
Installation

==================================

INTRODUCTION ==================================

This application has been made due to an IT internship which I would like to attend at Hipages group. Its goal is to give the user an experience in which the Twitter activities related to Hipages will be revealed in a life changing way.

================================== 2. FUNCTIONALITIES

This application is able to do the very basic functionalities of Twitter. You can search for hashtags, @ mentions, and so on. The main focus of this app is the profile of Hipages Group. By default the statuses from its profile will be shown. A known issue are the responses. When you are searching for something using this application you will be shown status updates as well as their comments in one single stream. This might be resolved in future updates.

I'm at this point not entirely sure whether it is required or not for me to add additional features.

================================== 3. BACKEND TECHNOLOGY

For this application I decided to use Java. The backend server is functional as a RESTful webservice. It gets requests from the client (webbrowser), connects to Twitter, and sends back information in JSON format.

________________________
|                      |
|        CLIENT        |
|______________________|
            |
            |
            v
________________________
|                      |
|   JAVA RESTServer    |
|______________________|
            |
            |
            v
________________________
|                      |
|       TWITTER        |
|______________________|

Everything the Java server really has to do is translate the requests into other requests. The server is created using a library called Jersey and the object-to-JSON conversion is done using the library GSON.

The connection from Java to Twitter has been established using a library called Twitter4J. This library is specialized in Twitter. This said, you will probably understand that the Java layer might actually be able to work with only one class with a few methods (one method for each request).

However, I thought that might be a bit too easy and ugly for a challenge like this and I decided to make a better design. This application now contains five Java packages:

domain
controllers
services
builders
tests

The MVC pattern has obviously done its work in here. However, the namegiving might be a bit weird: the domain is equal to a model, the controllers are actually the views and the services are really just controllers. Right now I'm a bit confused about the reason for this as well.

The fourth package, called builders, is something different. This package is being used to create the actual connection to Twitter. The Twitter4J library has entirely been encapsulated in this package. The rest of the project can only use its interfaces. That said, it would be really easy to switch to another library if Twitter4J gets deprecated at a certain moment.

Twitter4J has its own domain model. However, relying on this model would be in conflict with the statement above. That's why I created my own domain model which contains only the information which will be used by the frontend of this application.

Last but not least there is a test package. This package contains some tests which are used to confirm whether the implementation of the Java layer is correct.

================================== 4. FRONTEND TECHNOLOGY

The user of this application can access its features using a web browser. I decided to use the frontend framework Bootstrap, as it is open-source and very usefull for small projects like this. It's also produced by Twitter so that makes it even better for this particular project.

As JavaScript usually tends to become one big dirty fix I tried to implement some Object-oriented features. This doesn't take away that it still looks quite chaotic. As for the rest the frontend is not really very interesting. It makes use of Ajax, parses JSON, and so on...

================================== 5. INSTALLATION

This application requires Java to run on the computer as well as Tomcat. All libraries used in this project are defined using Maven. In the file pom.xml you will be able to see all dependencies. To compile this project it is also required to have Maven installed. You can start compiling using this command in your project directory:

mvn clean install

After running this code a folder called 'target' will be created in your project root directory. This folder contains a .war file which you will need to copy into the webapps folder of Tomcat. Now all you have to do is restart Tomcat (or just wait for 10 seconds until Tomcat identifies the file). Now go to

http://localhost:8080/hipages-twitter-app/