Looks like Guy Kawasaki was talking (point 6) about using twitter for web 2.0 publicity again, at the recent Nasscom - Tweetup meet. Twitteybot is just that, a dead simple tweet automator :). This post deals with the technical details. The source code is available here. The overall architecture of the website is simple.
The application is hosted on the Google App Engine and uses the built in persistance, user accounts, cron jobs and tasks.
Starting from the persistence layer, there are are two major objects; one to store the twitter account auth tokens, and the other to store actual tweets that have to be scheduled. There is another object to stores the application properties and it primarily stores the twitter oauth key and secret. I put them in the database instead of a properties file to enable revocation, etc without having to redeploy the application.
The servlet layer simply fetches this data using either the TwitterAccountManager or the StatusManager classes. The UI makes direct calls to these classes to manage the data at the backend.
The UI is simply an interface to modify the objects at the backend. The only other functionality are the tool boxes at the left that let a user schedule and shrink the tweets. These are purely javascript functions that modify the values to be sent to the backend.
The cron job runs every minute, checking for tweets, older than the current time. If it finds any, it adds them to a taks queue. The Task queue looks at the tweets, one after the other and is responsible for posting them to twitter. The twitter oauth credentials are saved in memcache as they would not change very often.
A lot of code has been written, and a lot more need to be. Please take a look at the site and criticize, suggest or even appretiate.
Here are the list of issues that I would be working, once I get back. I would definitely welcome help, so if you are interested in churning out some code, do drop me a comment.
