Ruby Tuesday #17 : Ain't no party like an HTTParty

This week, I noticed on RubyInside that there’s a new gem called HTTParty that simplifies calling APIs over HTTP.  Since this is exactly what I have been doing with Twitter and SSDS I thought I’d have a look at it.  First port of call is the example on RubyForge.  There’s some more examples on github – the Twitter example is here.

The next step is to take the Twitter client I wrote before and refactor it to use HTTParty.  Here’s the resulting code:

require 'httparty'

class Twitter
  include HTTParty
  base_uri 'twitter.com'
  format  ml

  def download_public_timeline
    download_timeline('statuses/public_timeline.xml')
  end

  def download_friends_timeline(username, password)
    download_timeline("statuses/friends_timeline/#{username}.xml", username, password)
  end

  def download_user_timeline(username)
    download_timeline("statuses/user_timeline/#{username}.xml")
  end

  def update(update_text, username, password)
    self.class.post("update.xml", { :query => {:status => update_text}, :basic_auth => {:username => username, :password => password}})
  end

  private
  
  def download_timeline(path, username=nil, password=nil)
    self.class.get(path, {:basic_auth => {:username => username, :password => password}}
  end
end

Add a little code to call the class to make sure it works:

require "Twitter"
require 'pp' 
$KCODE = "u" 
username = 'Put your username here'
password= 'Put your password here'
client = Twitter.new
puts "Public Timeline\r\n"
puts "***********************"
pp client.download_public_timeline
puts "***********************"
puts "Friends Timeline\r\n"
puts "***********************"
pp client.download_friends_timeline(username, password)
puts "***********************"
puts "User Timeline\r\n"
puts "***********************"
pp client.download_user_timeline(username)
puts "***********************" 
client.update("Tweeting with Ruby via HTTParty", username, password)

And it all works – apart from a few of the usual timeouts and grumbles from Twitter.  Less code and simpler code.  This time around I’m using pp (pretty-printer) to format the output – this gives a good view of what HTTParty is returning.  My next step with HTTParty is to use it for the SSDS code I wrote.

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