Java – How to Get Started with Twitter HBC Streaming API

This article represents instructions on how to get started with HBC, A Java HTTP client, for consuming Twitter’s Streaming API. Please feel free to comment/suggest if I missed to mention one or more important points. Also, sorry for the typos.

Following are the key points described later in this article:

• How to get Twitter Consumer/Access Token Keys
• Instructions to Get Started with HBC

How to get Twitter Consumer/Access Token Keys

Before getting started with HBC API for integrating with Twitter API, make sure that you have acquired following four details from Twitter:

• Consumer Key
• Consumer Secret
• Access Token
• Access Secret Token

All of the above keys could be started from Twitter application page. Start by creating an app.

Instructions to Get Started with HBC

The instructions below works for Eclipse IDE.

• Download the HBC source files from https://github.com/twitter/hbc
• Build the HBC libraries and obtain dependencies. I recommend you to look at our other blog on how to build hbc jar files.
• Create a Java project in your Eclipse IDE. Right-click on src folder and import the hbc-example source files from hbc-example/src/main/java
• Add the jar dependencies in the project build-path. These jar files could be found hbc-example/target/dependency
• Open a file say, SampleStreamExample. This is found within com.twitter.hbc.example package.
• Pass following for arg[0], arg[1], arg[2], arg[3] respectively and run the file. and, that is it. You should be able to see the message being retrieved from twitter.
  • Consumer key
  • Consumer secret
  • Access token
  • Access token secret
• You could experiment with other files in examples such as SitestreamExample, Twitter4jSampleStreamExample etc.