The twitter API site lists 3 java twitter libraries.
Do you know others? What are your experiences in support, ease of use, stability, community, etc.
The twitter API site lists 3 java twitter libraries.
Do you know others? What are your experiences in support, ease of use, stability, community, etc.
For anyone still looking at this question, it's worth mentioning that the only API that Twitter currently lists on its website for Java is Twitter4J. So, if you needed any more convincing that this was the one to use, well, here you go!
I just took a look at them.
JTwitter definitely looks like the weakest of the three. It doesn't appear to have been updated lately, doesn't cover much of the Twitter API, and doesn't appear to have any releases besides the initial one. On the upside, it's LPGL licensed, comes packaged with what little extra code it needs, and looks small and simple to understand.
The other two, java-twitter and Twtter4J look much closer in quality. Both cover the core API, and both have all the accouterments of normal open-source projects: publicly available source code repository, on-line docs, active mailing lists, and recent development activity.
However, Twitter4J looks to be the leader. From the docs, its API coverage appears to be more complete. The mailing list is definitely more active. The docs are much better. And most importantly to me, the releases have been more frequent. java-twitter has one release up, the "0.9-SNAPSHOT" release about 4 months ago. Twitter4J has had several releases in that time period, including 2.0.0 and incremental releases up through 2.0.8, fixing issues and adding support for new Twitter APIs.
I'm going to start with Twitter4J; if you don't hear back, assume it was just great for me.
I have selected Twitter4j because a lot of people are working on it. And its easy to find out some contents on Internet about it.
I think Twitter4j is good one it is most upto date API
Ahem; JTwitter is actively maintained, regularly updated (version 1.6.2 released today), and covers most of the Twitter API.
It's missing only a method for setting your profile image and a few other profile settings. Other than that, it's pretty complete. Status updates, timelines, friendships, lists, searches, streaming, etc.
It's also fast and robust. Twitter can be flaky in places and JTwitter has work-arounds and informative exceptions to make your life easier.
As the main JTwitter developer, I am rather biased! But the feedback from developers using JTwitter is also very positive.
There's also TweetStream4J which is a Java binding for the Twitter Streaming API. It's pretty simple, and unlike the last time I used it, the author has updated it to include a pom.xml file so you can build it. It's pretty simple and quick when I last used it (from Scala).