Desired Features
Read-only Portlet
The simplest version of the Twitter portlet might be a simple, unauthenticated view that displays a public Twitter feed to all users. For example, we might want to create a portlet that displays the most recent tweets from the uPortal twitter user. This portlet would be read-only and would not require authentication.
Potential features:
- Display a number of recent public tweets for a particular user via AJAX
- CONFIG mode allows admin-only configuration of
- username of Twitter account to be displayed
- number of tweets to be displayed
- proxy request timeout
Read/write Portlet
A more complex version of this portlet might display an authenticated user's friends' updates and allow the user to update his or her status.
Potential features:
- Allow a user to indicate his/her username and authenticate to Twitter
- Obtain OAuth token for a user, to be stored as an encrypted portlet preference
- Display friend status updates
- Allow user to post tweets
Technical Details
Twitter offers an OAuth-protected REST service, as documented at http://dev.twitter.com/. A Twitter portlet might be created by binding the JSON-formatted results of REST feeds to a user interface using the Fluid renderer.
Current Project Status
A Twitter portlet exists in the Jasig sandbox under the name FluidTwitterPortlet. This portlet is an updated version of a sample application originally developed by the Fluid community.
Completing this portlet would involve the following steps:
- Update the Javascript code to work successfully in a portlet environment
- Update the portlet to use OAuth instead of Basic Auth