Using JSON to access the Twitter search API
Steve Reynolds recently wrote a blog post showing how to access the twitter search API using PHP, cURL, and JQuery.
Steve used JQuery to post to a page on his server, which then cURLed in search results for a given term. This approach is often necessary to get avoid the issue of cross domain ajax calls.
While this approach works well, there’s an even easier way to go about it – $.getJSON!
There are two main advantages to this approach:
- Server side technology isn’t an issue. You don’t have to rely on PHP, cURL, firewalls, anything like that. It will even work on a static HTML page!
- All the work is done on the client’s browser – saving precious bandwidth! This could be important on busy sites.
I’ve knocked up a quick-and-dirty demonstration of this concept. If a name doesn’t already exist for this methodology, my vote goes for JAJA (Javascript and JSON, asynchronous!)
Thanks for this! Can you do authenticated calls to the Twitter API using this?
@Steve Reynolds – you can’t. The twitter search API is different from the main Twitter API, which requires authentication. PHP + cURL would be the way to go for that.
Thanks, i was going to ask the same question as steve, thanks for the answer, and nice post, this still has some really cool applications.
I thought that you couldn’t harvest cross-site with JS?
I like the name of JAJA
That example is not working in my browser. FF3.02 on Linux.
Great concept, but I also had a problem of no response in the demo.
regards
George
thats great that you are talking about the twitter api,a good example of searching with the twitter api is on twiogle.com because you can search on twitter and google at the same time.
Great followup to Steve Reynolds’ article using the JSON aproach. Interesting to see how the two compare. However your demo doesn’t seem to be working. I’d love to see it in action. Can this be fixed?
Too bad JSON doesn’t work with IE8 yet. Perhaps I will help the developper and post some bugreports.
- Mike
Wha’s the best brower for this?
very interesting, although i still had problems with the demo
[...] Twitter Search API, jQuery and some CSS (also ref: http://johnmc.co/llum/using-json-to-access-the-twitter-search-api/ for use of $.getJSON). [...]