Data acquisition using Twitter
The Twitter API is used in conjunction with HBC's HTTP client to acquire tweets, as previously illustrated in the Handling Twitter section of Chapter 2, Data Acquisition. This process involves using the public stream API at the default access level to pull a sample of public tweets currently streaming on Twitter. We will refine the data based on user-selected keywords.
To begin, we declare the TwitterStream class. It consists of two instance variables, (numberOfTweets and topic), two constructors, and a stream method. The numberOfTweets variable contains the number of tweets to select and process, and topic allows the user to search for tweets related to a specific topic. We have set our default constructor to pull 100 tweets related to Star Wars:
public class TwitterStream {
private int numberOfTweets;
private String topic;
public TwitterStream() {
this(100, "Stars Wars");
}
public...