I making a php server/page which is supposed to capture a users twitter feed and then provide it in a JSON format to another application and/or mobile device in JSON format.
Twitter provides it's data already in JSON format by using .json after the timeline url. But this is limited to 150 requests/hour which can be a problem being on a shared hosted server.
If been trying to use the twitteroauth php library with API keys. Before I can start communicating with the API I always need to sign in with a twitter account. Using the API is limited to 350 request/hour.
Is there a way to use the library not needing to log in to capture the timeline?
Or what is a better way to achieve my goal, creating a php-page providing me the timeline on request?
If I understand the question correct, the problem is that you make to many request to the Twitter API that doesn't require log on. In that case, if you don't want to use the API that require login, I guess you could implement some caching. Let your server run a cron every minute that check the Twitter API for new tweets, and store the tweets in a database or a textfile.
Then, when a user request your page for JSON, you read from your cache instead of going straight to the Twitter API every time. That way you will save a lot of traffic between your server and Twitter, and you would still be very close to real time when it comes to up-to-date tweets, as you with 150 requests/hour could update your cache every 30 seconds or so.
Related
I need to integrate Google Fit data on a project in PHP.
The idea is that every user, if he wants, can authorize the download of his Google Fit data.
Now, I was wondering if there are bees to handle this situation. Also if they are free.
Have you ever come across something like this? Thanks
Google Fit's REST API only supports requests from a single user.
The only way you can access multiple users' data is for each of those users to have given you an OAuth token which grants access to their data; you then need to make separate requests for each user's data using that user's OAuth token.
My php app is integrated with Facebook's Graph API. I recently conducted load testing and found out that I hit the 600 requests per 600 seconds limit rather easily with a low number of users(1 large single batch request per user). In order to make my app work I feel that I would need to rely on user tokens(client side) instead of my single app token(server side).
My question is: Is what I want to do even possible and does my proposed solution make sense and how could I implement it?
1) Use JS sdk to login the user to FB and obtain a user token
2) Pass the user token to the php side
3) Make the graph api call using the user token
I am reading http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/534/.
It says "this allows you to connect the user to your site or app using the JavaScript SDK (FB.login or the Login Button) and then call Platform APIs from server-side PHP without doing additional work". Does this mean using the user token or app token?
I am not looking to be spoon fed code, but could someone please point me in the right direction and give their opinion on my proposed solution?
Thanks
Is there a way to know that a user posted a tweet as soon as he does it? Maybe Twitter can ping your app or something?
What if I have a user base of 100.000 users? It's hard to check constantly all.
Thank you,
Andrew
Check out the Streaming API, specificially user streams: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-api/user-streams
You would use the Streaming API for this case. This is exactly what this does, you open a firehose and Twitter pings your application with new tweets every time there is an update based on your query. If your using PHP, you can make implementing the streaming API easier by using the 140 framework.
from streaming API method doc
The default access level allows up to 400 track keywords, 5,000 follow
userids and 25 0.1-360 degree location boxes. If you need elevated
access to the Streaming API, you should explore our partner providers
of Twitter data here.
I have a large number of twitter users I wish to sydicate onto a website using PHP and caching the tweets in MySQL. However I seem to be stumped by the rate-limit problem when ever I access the API. Every request I make to every user seems to count as a request, which stands to reason.
I notice other sites* doing this exact thing successfully. How are they getting around this, are they simply whitelisted, or is there a technique I'm missing?
*http://www.twackle.com/NFL/Aaron-Rodgers_1/tweets
The streaming API is what you are looking for, and more specifically, the filter method. Filter, at its least-privileged level, will allow you to follow 5,000 users in realtime, without them having to authorize your app, and you can track up to 400 keywords using this method as well.
Now, if you want historical tweets as well, you will have to pull those from the REST API (the streaming API's count parameter doesn't really help here), but since you can only retrieve the last 3200 tweets for a user via the REST API, you can pretty much backfill all available tweet history with 16 calls to statuses/user_timeline by passing in a count parameter value of 200 and paging accordingly.
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=barackobama&count=200&page=2
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=barackobama&count=200&page=3
http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=barackobama&count=200&page=4
With your 350 calls per hour per single Twitter account, you could backfill approximately 22 full user timelines per hour.
On the implementation side, you'd probably be interested in Phirehose, a streaming API client interface for PHP.
try to auth first, before get the tweets. that should increase the rate limit
A simple method of combining multiple user_timelines is to create a Twitter list and use GET /:user/lists/:id/status. That single API request will return the most recent tweets from all users on the list.
I am doing some benchmark testing on my web app and notice that the responses from Facebooks API are a lot slower than Twitters.
** For the record, I am using the twitter-async library for Twitter API integration and Facebooks own library here
With the Twitter library I can save an oAuth token & secret, I then use these to create an instance and make calls, simple. For Facebook, unless I ask for offline_permission, I must store an oAuth code and recreate an oAuth access token each time the user logs into my app.
Given the above I can:
Retrieve a Twitter users timeline in 0.02 seconds.
Get a FB oAuth Access Code in 1.16 seconds, then I can get the users details in 2.31 seconds, totalling 3.47 seconds to get the users details.
These statistics are from using functions Facebook has provided in their PHP API library. I also tried implementing my own CURL functions to get this information via a request and the results are not much better.
Is this the same kind of response times others are getting using the Facebook API?
Besides requesting offline permission and storing the permanent access token, how else can I speed up these requests, is the problem on my end or Facebooks?
Thanks,
Chris
I also have the experience the Facebook API is quite slow. I believe the facebook PHP API does not much more than wrap around CURL in the case of API calls so it makes sense that this didn't improve the speeds.
I work on a canvas page, which means for existing users, I get an access token and fb_UID as he/she comes in. At first, I did a /me graph call and sometimes a /me/friends. The first takes like 0.6 secs, the second usually a bit more. So in that case I can (to some extend) confirm your findings.
That's why I've now switched to storing important stuff locally and updating it only when needed (real time update API). Basically, I don't need any API calls during 'normal' operation.
I realize you are probably integrating FB on your own page, and perhaps use a bit more info than just name, fb-UID & friends, and that this solution is not totally answering your question. But perhaps it can still function as a small piece of the puzzle ;)
I am looking forward to other perspectives on this as well!
My application calls multiple URL's from Facebook. It does take some time :/
This is why I decided to write a function which stores the results in $_SESSION so I can use it again later, along with a timestamp to see if the data is too old.
This doesn't solve the actual problem, it just saves you having to keep fetching it.
What I like to do for end user experience, is forward them to page with a loading .gif - then have javascript request the page that actually fetches data. That way, the user remains on a loading page with a nice gif to stare at, until the next page is ready.