Update your Twitter status from ColdFusion using a JSP tag library

Posted on : February 4, 2009 3:35 PM | Posted by : Troy
Related Categories: Twitter,ColdFusion

Today I wanted to find an easy way to put a status update into my Twitter account using ColdFusion. I went searching the API docs, and found this page.

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Libraries

Unfortunately, there are no CF examples listed, boo! However, there are some for Java, so I continued my search in that direction. Eventually I found this JSP taglib, and decided to give it a "Twirl" :)

http://www.servletsuite.com/servlets/twittertag.htm

To use any JSP taglib, you simply drop the .jar file into your /webroot/WEB-INF/lib/ directory. I believe it also requires the Enterprise edition of ColdFusion. A good article that fully explains their usage was done by Charlie Arehart back in May 2002.

After copying the file, you must then restart ColdFusion. This is a must or you will get an error when attempting to import the library.

That's it, I was now ready to test a Twitter post. Here is the sample code I used that will put a new status message in my Twitter account. I saved this in a file twitter.cfm, then browsed to the page on my local machine as http://localhost/twitter.cfm

<cfimport taglib="/WEB-INF/lib/twittertag.jar" prefix="twitter">
<twitter:update user="your_username_here" password="your_password_here" id="result">
My posting to Twitter from CF <cfoutput>#now()#</cfoutput>
</twitter:update>

Upon success, an XML dataset is returned in the "result" variable. If you cfdump it, looks like this.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <status> <created_at>Wed Feb 04 21:29:26 +0000 2009</created_at> <id>1177644114</id> <text>My posting to Twitter from CF {ts '2009-02-04 15:29:28'}</text> <source>web</source> <truncated>false</truncated> <in_reply_to_status_id></in_reply_to_status_id> <in_reply_to_user_id></in_reply_to_user_id> <favorited>false</favorited> <in_reply_to_screen_name></in_reply_to_screen_name> <user> <id>20062919</id> <name>Twin Cities CFUG</name> <screen_name>TCCFUG</screen_name> <location>St. Paul, MN USA</location> <description>Adobe ColdFusion User Group -of Minneapolis / St. Paul, Minnesota</description> <profile_image_url>http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/75391930/colderfusion_twitter_normal.jpg</profile_image_url> <url>http://groups.adobe.com/groups/bd9082a926/</url> <protected>false</protected> <followers_count>0</followers_count> </user> </status>

If you fail to restart CF, you will see this TagExtraInfo error message:

The TagExtraInfo class com.cj.twitter.strVariable for the update tag could not be found.

The CFML compiler was processing:
* A cfimport tag beginning on line 1, column 2.

This is not the best solution if you are in a shared hosting environment, as they may not install the twittertag.jar file for you. I'm curious what other methods developers have found to accomplish status posts to Twitter.

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Chris Gottshall's Gravatar That's a good solution. I built a CFC to work with the Twitter API a while back, but I think using Java solutions are often overlooked. Thanks for posting this.
# Posted by Chris Gottshall | 2/6/09 10:15 AM
habeyhl's Gravatar Any idea what to do about this error:

com/cj/twitter/strVariable (Unsupported major.minor version 49.0)

I installed the Jar file as you directed so I'm not sure what's going on. I'm new to JSPs and APIs :\
# Posted by habeyhl | 2/23/09 5:21 PM
Troy's Gravatar @habeyhl, Look thru the comments on this Forta post, @Samson discusses the same error and how to fix.
http://www.forta.com/blog/index.cfm?mode=entry&...
# Posted by Troy | 2/27/09 9:53 PM
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