Twitter4J: How do I return the tweets printed by sample/filter methods?

Question

What I am doing?
I am trying to build an application with a User Interface. The user will enter the search term and then using a websocket connection, I would start returning the filtered tweets to UI.

What I did?
I have a TwitterFilter class that looks like

public TwitterFilter(String searchTerm) {
        final ConfigurationBuilder configurationBuilder = getConfigurationBuilder();

        twitterStream = new TwitterStreamFactory(configurationBuilder.build()).getInstance();
        final StatusListener statusListener = getStatusListener();

        filterQuery = new FilterQuery();
        filterQuery.track(new String[] { searchTerm });
        filterQuery.language(new String[] { "en" });
        twitterStream.addListener(statusListener);

    }

    public void getFilteredTweets() {
        twitterStream.filter(filterQuery);
    }

    private static StatusListener getStatusListener() {
        return new StatusListener() {
            @Override
            public void onStatus(final Status status) {
                System.out.println(status.getText());
            }

            @Override
            public void onDeletionNotice(final StatusDeletionNotice statusDeletionNotice) {

            }

            @Override
            public void onTrackLimitationNotice(final int i) {

            }

            @Override
            public void onScrubGeo(final long userId, final long upToStatusId) {
            }

            @Override
            public void onStallWarning(final StallWarning stallWarning) {

            }

            @Override
            public void onException(final Exception e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        };
    }

    private static ConfigurationBuilder getConfigurationBuilder() {
        final ConfigurationBuilder configurationBuilder = new ConfigurationBuilder();
        configurationBuilder.setDebugEnabled(true);
        configurationBuilder.setOAuthConsumerKey(CONSUMER_KEY);
        configurationBuilder.setOAuthConsumerSecret(CONSUMER_SECRET);
        configurationBuilder.setOAuthAccessToken(ACCESS_TOKEN);
        configurationBuilder.setOAuthAccessTokenSecret(ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET);
        return configurationBuilder;
    }

and a class with websocket code, that needs to return tweets filtered by Twitter, looks as

@ServerEndpoint("/tweets")
public class TweetStreamServer {
    @OnMessage
    public void tweets(final String message, final Session client) throws IOException, InterruptedException {
        final TwitterFilter twitterFilter = new TwitterFilter("india");
        for (final Session peer: client.getOpenSessions()) {
            peer.getBasicRemote().sendText(twitterFilter.getFilteredTweets()); // compilation error
        }
    }
}

Problem?
Since neither filter() or sample() methods return anything( void ), how do I return the tweets? ( documentation )?

Answer 1

This program implements streaming api. Your use case requires user to enter the search term and you have to return the tweets with that search term.

Possible Implementations:

1. Use rest api:

Use oauth and login using user's credentials, then return the tweets you get.

https://github.com/yusuke/twitter4j/blob/master/twitter4j-examples/src/main/java/twitter4j/examples/search/SearchTweets.java

Rate limitations: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/rate-limiting/1.1/limits You can get only 180 tweets every 15 minutes (per user).

2. Streaming api:

This is not a rest api search. When you track particular keyword or follow an user, you get the tweets whenever they are tweeted (live). This is different from searching. You cannot know when a twitter user tweets using the keywords you are tracking. Since this is a live stream.

Start the stream with possible keywords. Save the results in a database and search the database when you get a request from user. When user enters a new keyword, stop the stream, add the new keyword to the list of keywords already tracking and start the stream. [You can only have one connection to streaming api from one IP address].