[Craig328]

I didn't do much original to warrent this post...except spend parts of the past 2 weeks trying to come up with a solution for a CF powered site to properly interact with Twitter. By which I mean users to my site authorize our application for my site that then allows us to post Tweets for them (when they ask us to), get certain Twitter stats for their accounts, allows them a one-touch follow process per other users of my site, etc.

I started (as many CFers do) by discovering Twitter4J but immediately discovered two important things:

• I'm a CF developer and not a Java developer
  
• I have this fetish wherein I like things to work...or at least be properly documented in case they don't.

In either event, this meant that Twitter4J just wasn't for me. From having to have access to the web server for the site to drop in a .jar file to realizing most of the way through my project that the sparse documentation I was in possession of was stale by a factor of two full point releases and that object methods the examples used no longer existed...I was pretty much launched on a quest to find some other way to navigate the maddening complexity that is Twitter's OAuth powered API.

Monday, I discovered the alternative for ColdFusion devs who want to integrate Twitter into their projects. It's called monkehTweets and is merely a collection of .cfc files that is easily dropped into most sites and works pretty damned easily thereafter. Much easier to use than Twitter4J, monkehTweets is one of those things you actually have a chance of fixing on your own should it not work according to plan. It even comes with one of the easiest video tutorials I've ever seen as well as a nice .zip file of CF code so if you're as lazy and/or discouraged as I got from trying to understand why Satan wrote OAuth in the first place (the only plausible explanation to my mind), you can simply look at what Matt Gifford (monkehTweet's author) has done and blatantly use that as a template to forge your own sweet, sweet success with Twitter's API.

As the discerning reader might pick up on, I'm somewhat delirious with relief that I can finally move past most of my site's Twitter integration issues and move on to other pressing items...like Facebook integration. Anyway, my current mood means I feel like sharing the good (and unfortunately hard-to-find) news with the rest of the CF community.

[xheartonfire43x]

Craig, are you using RIAForge at all? I have gotten into the habit of making a quick search on there whenever I do almost anything.

[Craig328]

Yes, I check RIAForge from time to time. In fact, before I wrestled with Twitter4J I had tried Coldfusion Twitter Lib listed there. It hadn't been updated to reflect Twitter's move to OAuth back at the end of 2009 and so it didn't work.

I hadn't seen monkehTweets come up there before when I looked. I see that it was updated there about 3 weeks back.

[xheartonfire43x]

Yeah I am starting to remember Matt (the ColdfuMonkeh) only put monkehTweets on RIAForge recently. Another resource you could check out in the future is GitHub. A lot of ColdFusion open source projects have been moving to Github for the awesome Git support.