The single thing that would help me the most is a Twitter-created open
source library to connect to Streaming, written in *C* and supplied
with SWIG ".i" interface definition files. That way, I would know:
a. I had the correct connection algorithm, backoffs, DNS time-to-live, etc.
b. I had Twitter-supplied code.
c. I could connect to Streaming using *any* scripting language SWIG supports.
I haven't looked at all of the libraries, but the two I've worked
with, one in Ruby and one in Perl, both translate the raw JSON coming
out of Streaming into "native" objects. This isn't going to scale, and
Twitter recommends against it.
I simply want a C library to connect to Streaming with a specified
parameter set, do the DNS time-to-live stuff right, do the reconnect
stuff right, and present me with JSON text lines I can queue, write to
a file, or, for that matter, drop on the floor. And really, I only
care about JSON - you can go ahead and deprecate XML and I'll write a
blog post telling the world how many kittens you've saved! ;-)
I think the rest of the API is very well-covered in open source
libraries. I only work in Perl and Ruby, so I can't comment on the
other major languages, but I've never heard any complaints from my PHP
and Python friends. ;-)
--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
borasky-research.net/m-edward-ed-borasky/
"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems." ~ Paul Erdos
