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TwitterInTime

Scott Caron May 13, 2009

Overview

My Twitter in Time project consists of a web server that has a user interface where the user can enter a search word. The program will then use the search word to find the names of the people who have recently twittered about it. The number of names is also set by the user and the results are printed out in list form using HTML.

Screenshot

Concepts Demonstrated

• List manipulation is used to access a specific part in the returned xml.
• Recursion is used to iterate through the list and print out desired information.
• Data Abstraction is used to access the XML data online.

External Technology

This project uses Schemes ability to create a web server, this can be done with many built in libraries including net/url. In doing so scheme creates a local server that html can be written to and displayed instead of through the interactions window. I also used Twitter's Search API which returns data in json or atom, for this project I chose atom which is also known as xml. I used the ssax.plt package that I found on the Planet Scheme website to parse through the xml data to get the values that i desired.

Innovation

In todays day and age everyone seems to be curious about what everyone else is doing and Twitter solves this problem perfectly. What my program does is allow you to see how many people are actually doing a certain thing. So now not only do you know what there doing, you know all of these peoples names as well. Who knows, maybe you'll see a friends name pop up for something you didnt think they would twitter about.

Technology Used Block Diagram

Here is a simple block diagram of my software system that illustrates the major technical components and how they interact with each other:

Additional Remarks

Not all of these projects will satisfy everyone, but I believe people will get a kick out of seeing the names of the people twittering about the topic they typed in. And for future reference all XML parsing should be done at the beginning of a project because it is no easy feat especially when different API's return different looking XML.