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.
