BibaBlog

I have learned the last 5 day for business studies and was so bored that I really got happy when I saw the article about a Twitter-Maven-Plugin on entwickler.com yesterday morning.
We still use Ant as building system in our development team so I searched for an Ant task which enables Twitter support. As I did not found any plugin I started to write my own simple task called ant-twitter.

Features

• Support for URL shortening service bit.ly via bitlyj
• Support for messages more than 140 characters – the message will be splitted into two or more messages. A small source snippet is taken  from jtwitter – thanks a lot guys!
• Open source – Apache license
• It is simple

Installation

I assume you have already installed Ant-1.70 (1.6x should work although) and configured your Ant working environment. I refer to $ANT_LIB$ which is a directory where your Ant installation can found further JARs (should be appended to your classpath).

• Download needed packages and extract them to $ANT_LIB$:
  • bitlyj-1.0-snapshot
  • twitter4j-2.0.10 – you have to extract all files in directory lib, too!
  • json-lib-2.3 – needed by bitlyj

  •   ant-twitter-1.0.zip (25.9 KiB, 293 hits)

• Create a file twitter4j.properties in your classpath ($ANT_LIB$) and paste the following code into it:

  twitter4j.http.useSSL=true
  twitter4j.debug=false
  

Usage

After you have installed the needed dependencies and upset your configuration you have to edit your build.xml. Put the following taskdef in top of your build file:

<project name="TwitterTestTask" default="main" basedir=".">
  <taskdef name="twitter" classname="de.ecw.ant.twitter.AntTwitterTask"/>

You are now able to use the twitter task in form of

    <twitter message="Hello World from Ant!" username="twitter-username" password="twitter-password" bitlyUsername="bitly-username" bitlyApiKey="bitly-key" enableBitly="false" />

ant-twitter has the following options:

• message (required, String): Your Twitter tweet
• username (required, String): Your Twitter screenname
• password (required, String): Your Twitter password
• bitlyUsername (optional, required if enableBitly=true, String): Your bit.ly username
• bitlyApiKey (optional, required if enableBitly=true, String): Your bit.ly API key
• enableBitly (optional, true|false): Enable bit.ly support