Concept

I love following people on twitter, but I sometimes forget to check for new messages. I decided the best way to alert me of new tweets would be to have them appear as KDE notifications as shown below. In order to complete this I make use of the Zend framework, and Derick Rethans’ pecl library for DBUS interactionto display the tweets as notifications.

Connecting to Twitter with PHP

The first step was to investigate how to connect to Twitter, which is not as simple as sending a username & password and seeing if they like it. Twitter announced that basic authentication was going to be closed down in August 2010 as they migrated to OAuth login. Thankfully the Zend framework now has Oauth built into their Twitter classes which makes this very easy.

Tokens & Keys

First of all, log into twitter.com and then go to the twitter development portal and click on 2. Register an app. After filling in the form you will be provided with 4 essential items.

1. Consumer Key
2. Consumer Secret
3. Oauth Token (under “My Access Token”)
4. Oauth Token Secret (under “My Access Token”)

PHP Code

Bare minimum php to get the twitter feed

This will retrieve your twitter feed as a simple XML object.

< ?php

set_include_path('../../Includes/');
require_once '../../Includes/Zend/Loader/Autoloader.php';
$loader = Zend_Loader_Autoloader::getInstance();

$token = new Zend_Oauth_Token_Access;
$oathParams = array();
$oathParams['oauth_token'] = 'insert your appropriate details from twitter here';
$oathParams['oauth_token_secret'] = 'insert your appropriate details from twitter here';
$token->setParams($oathParams);

$twitterParams = array();
$twitterParams['consumerKey'] = 'insert your appropriate details from twitter here';
$twitterParams['consumerSecret'] = 'insert your appropriate details from twitter here';
$twitterParams['accessToken'] = $token;
$twitter = new Zend_Service_Twitter($twitterParams);

$timeline = $twitter->statusFriendsTimeline($timelineParams);
var_dump($timeline);

?>

Bare minimum php dbus code to display a desktop notification

The first part makes use of Derick’s PECL extension to connect to the DBUS messaging system. The second part sets up the parameters to pass to the method. Of course I could just enter these parameters directly into the method call, but having them in this array makes it much easier for me to see what each parameter represents as it’s passed through to dbus.

< ?php

$DBus = new Dbus( Dbus::BUS_SESSION );
$DBusProxy = $DBus->createProxy
(
"org.freedesktop.Notifications", // connection name
"/org/freedesktop/Notifications", // object
"org.freedesktop.Notifications" // interface
);

$notifyParams = array();
$notifyParams['app_name'] = 'Twitter';
$notifyParams['replaces_id'] = new DBusUInt32(0);
$notifyParams['app_icon'] = '';
$notifyParams['summary'] = $title;
$notifyParams['body'] = '<a href="http://twitter.com/">'.$message.'</a>';
$notifyParams['actions'] = new DBusArray(DBus::STRING, array());
$notifyParams['hints'] = new DBusDict( DBus::VARIANT, array());
$notifyParams['timeout'] = 9000;

$returnId = $DBusProxy-&gt;Notify
(
$notifyParams['app_name'],
$notifyParams['replaces_id'],
$notifyParams['app_icon'],
$notifyParams['summary'],
$notifyParams['body'],
$notifyParams['actions'],
$notifyParams['hints'],
$notifyParams['timeout']
);

?&gt;

Putting it to use

< ?php

set_include_path('../../Includes/');
require_once '../../Includes/Zend/Loader/Autoloader.php';
$loader = Zend_Loader_Autoloader::getInstance();

$token = new Zend_Oauth_Token_Access;
$oathParams = array();
$oathParams['oauth_token'] = 'insert your appropriate details from twitter here';
$oathParams['oauth_token_secret'] = 'insert your appropriate details from twitter here';
$token->setParams($oathParams);

$twitterParams = array();
$twitterParams['consumerKey'] = 'insert your appropriate details from twitter here';
$twitterParams['consumerSecret'] = 'insert your appropriate details from twitter here';
$twitterParams['accessToken'] = $token;
$twitter = new Zend_Service_Twitter($twitterParams);

$timelineParams = array();
$timelineParams['count'] = 1;

while (true)
{
$consoleMessage = 'Checking for tweets';
if (isset ($lastTweetID))
{
$consoleMessage .= ' since tweet #' . $lastTweetID;
$consoleMessage .= ' by ' . $lastTweetName;
$consoleMessage .= ' created on ' . $lastTweetTime;
$timelineParams['since_id'] = $lastTweetID;
}
else
{
$consoleMessage .= ' for the first time';
}
echo $consoleMessage . "\n";

try
{
$timeline = $twitter->statusFriendsTimeline($timelineParams);
foreach ($timeline as $status)
{
$title = '"' . 'New tweet by '. $status->user->name . '"';
$message = str_replace('"', '\"', $status->text);
$lastTweetName = (string)$status->user->name;
$lastTweetID = (string)$status->id;
$lastTweetTime = (string)$status->created_at;

$DBus = new Dbus( Dbus::BUS_SESSION );
$DBusProxy = $DBus->createProxy
(
"org.freedesktop.Notifications", // connection name
"/org/freedesktop/Notifications", // object
"org.freedesktop.Notifications" // interface
);

$notifyParams = array();
$notifyParams['app_name'] = 'Twitter';
$notifyParams['replaces_id'] = new DBusUInt32(0);
$notifyParams['app_icon'] = '';
$notifyParams['summary'] = $title;
$notifyParams['body'] = '<a href="http://twitter.com/">'.$message.'</a>';
$notifyParams['actions'] = new DBusArray(DBus::STRING, array());
$notifyParams['hints'] = new DBusDict( DBus::VARIANT, array());
$notifyParams['timeout'] = 9000;

$returnId = $DBusProxy-&gt;Notify
(
$notifyParams['app_name'],
$notifyParams['replaces_id'],
$notifyParams['app_icon'],
$notifyParams['summary'],
$notifyParams['body'],
$notifyParams['actions'],
$notifyParams['hints'],
$notifyParams['timeout']
);
}

}
catch (Exception $e)
{
echo 'Caught exception: Restarting in 30 seconds', $e-&gt;getMessage(), "\n";
}

echo 'Sleeping for 30 seconds' . "\n\n";
sleep(30);
}
?&gt;

Execution

Open a konsole and execute the php file and you should see the results…

php ./GetTwitterFeed.php
Checking for tweets for the first time
Executing kdialog --title "New tweet by Derick Rethans" --passivepopup "Done with my \"Profiling PHP Applications\" talk at #4developers If you were there, please rate at http://joind.in/3200" 15
Sleeping for 30 seconds

Checking for tweets since tweet #54887445040332800 by Derick Rethans created on Mon Apr 04 12:46:01 +0000 2011
Sleeping for 30 seconds

Quite simple really, please comment if you found this useful. Next will be something similar but for RSS feeds.