Couchbase : Create a large dataset using Twitter and Java

An easy way to create large dataset when playing/demonstrating Couchbase -or any other NoSQL engine- is to inject Twitter feed into your database.

For this small application I am using:

• Couchbase Server 2.0 Server
• Couchbase Java SDK (will be installed by Maven)
• Twitter4J (will be installed by Maven)
• Twitter Streaming API called using Twitter4J

In this example I am using Java to inject Tweets into Couchbase, you can obviously use another langage if you want to.

The sources of this project are available on my Github repository  Twitter Injector for Couchbase you can also download the Binary version here, and execute the application from the command line, see Run The Application paragraph. Do not forget to create your Twitter oAuth keys (see next paragraph) 

Create oAuth Keys

The first thing to do to be able to use the Twitter API is to create a set of keys. If you want to learn more about all these keys/tokens take a look to the oAuth protocol : http://oauth.net/

1. Log in into the Twitter Development Portal : https://dev.twitter.com/

2. Create a new Application 

Click on the "Create an App" link or go into the "User Menu > My Applications > Create a new application"

3. Enter the Application Details information

4. Click "Create Your Twitter Application" button

Your application's OAuth settings are now available :

5- Go down on the Application Settings page and click on the "Create My Access Token" button

You have now all the necessary information to create your application:

• Consumer key 
• Consumer secret
• Access token
• Access token secret

These keys will be uses in the twitter4j.properties file when running the Java application from the command line see

Create the Java Application

The following code is the main code of the application:

Some basic explanation:

• The setUp() method simply reads the twitter4j.properties file from the classpath to build the Couchbase connection string.
• The injectTweets opens the Couchbase connection -line 76- and calls the TwitterStream API. 
• A Listener is created and will receive all the onStatus(Status status) from Twitter. The most important method is onStatus() that receive the message and save it into Couchbase. 
• One interesting thing : since Couchbase is a JSON Document database it allows your to just take the JSON String and save it directly.
  cbClient.add(idStr,0 ,twitterMessage);

Packaging

To be able to execute the application directly from the Jar file, I am using the assembly plugin with the following informations from the pom.xml :

  ... 
  
    
     com.couchbase.demo.TwitterInjector
    
    
     .
    
  
  ...

Some information:

• The mainClass entry allows you to set which class to execute when running java -jar command.
• The Class-Path entry allows you to set the current directory as part of the classpath where the program will search for the twitter4j.properties file.
• The assembly file is also configure to include all the dependencies (Twitter4J, Couchbase client  SDK, ...)

If you do want to build it from the sources, simply run :

mvn clean package

This will create the following Jar file ./target/CouchbaseTwitterInjector.jar

Run the Java Application

Before running the application you must create a twitter4j.properties file with the following information :

twitter4j.jsonStoreEnabled=true

oauth.consumerKey=[YOUR CONSUMER KEY]
oauth.consumerSecret=[YOUR CONSUMER SECRET KEY]
oauth.accessToken=[YOUR ACCESS TOKEN]
oauth.accessTokenSecret=[YOUR ACCESS TOKEN SECRET]

couchbase.uri.list=http://127.0.0.1:8091/pools
couchbase.bucket=default
couchbase.password=

Save the properties file and from the same location run:

jar -jar [path-to-jar]/CouchbaseTwitterInjector.jar

This will inject Tweets into your Couchbase Server. Enjoy !