Developing Applications for Twitter using its API.

Twitter is widely used application and I use it a lot and sometime or other I have felt the need to build something of my own to facilitate my style of usage or to actuate upon my ideas. In this post I'll be sharing my journey from a newbie to twitter app developer by sharing each step as I go through.  Hope this helps all those new to twitter API.

Step 1: Register your application with twitter. Here is the link to do that :http://dev.twitter.com/apps/new

 After registration you will be provided with consumer and secret key to be used for authentication. Though during registration process twitter will ask you to provide domain name. It does not means that you need to commit your files to that domain, you can work locally too.

Step 2: Download OAuth library for the language that you'd be using for developement. I am using PHP and downloaded quite a few libraries to try namely : 
 http://classes.verkoyen.eu/twitter_oauth
http://github.com/themattharris/tmhOAuth/

Step 3: Apart from consumer key and secret key there are user_token and secret token, you can see them in your app>>My Access Token

Step 4 : First Example

As a first timer use this example :

http://github.com/themattharris/tmhOAuth/blob/master/examples/tweet.php

and just copy and paste the code to get the feel of the API.

Step 4 : Replace blanks with appropriate values from your app of the following variables :

        'consumer_key'    => '',
        'consumer_secret' => '',
        'user_token'      => '',
        'user_secret'     => '',

Step 5 : Save the file and run in your web browser. I used xampp for server.

Step 6 : Voila !!!! you just updated the status from PHP API.

More to come...