Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
2
Chapter
Twitter Applications:
Who's That Tweet?
Now that we have covered what we will be learning throughout the course of this topic,
it's time to get our hands dirty by jumping in and creating our first mobile web
applications. Both of these applications will be very simple applications that interact with
the Twitter API. An API, or an application programming interface, is an interface used to
interact with a specific application based off a set of rules or parameters given to the
application by the user. More often than not, one would use an API to gather and parse
data from the application's infrastructure without ever needing to directly connect to the
application's database to fetch that information.
The first application we will build is the application “Who's That Tweet?”, which will
parse through a small predefined list of verified Twitter users and display a random
tweet on the page, as well as a list of four possible individuals that might have created
that tweet.
The second small web application we will build is called “I Love Ham”, which will also be
borrowing Twitter's fire hose of data to create a quick and fun form of entertaining for
mobile users on the go. “I Love Ham” will focus on very basic game mechanics. The
user is presented with two predefined rhyming Twitter searches to choose from. If they
choose the Twitter search that receives the most results back, then they are the winners.
Both of these mobile web games will rely heavy on HTML5, JavaScript, and a fantastic
piece of technology called JSONP.
In this chapter, we'll get you up and running with a development environment on your
own personal computer (think of it as your own mini-Internet, which will connect to
Twitter on the real Internet, but mostly live just on your computer) and discuss the Who's
That Tweet? application. In the next chapter, we'll continue by discussing the I Love
Ham application. Let's get started!
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