Here’s another update from groovytweets.
As you may know, the ‘important view‘ is now done. It works quite nicely (it shows the groovy tweets that were at least retweeted once, based on users groovytweets is following). Unfortunately the technical implementation is a bit crazy. I first wanted to get a list of Tweets where tweet.importance > 0, then sort by tweet.date or tweet.statusId (statusId is a ever increasing number and the highest is the latest one). Sounds easy…. but: GAE/J does not allow you to query for one column of the bigtable db, then sort by another. I even got a special index, but nope, it seems impossible. So I finally did this: get the last 500 tweets (yes, 500, each request to the ‘important tweets’). Then in groovy, check for importance > 1, populate view. This works quite nicely, who cares as long as it works?
Another update just implemented: scanning for new groovy users to follow. So far, the additions of ‘friends’ of groovytweets has been a manual process. I simply selected the people I thought were interesting. I began logging the @replies a couple of days a ago, which already gave me some interesting insight but there is one issue with that: Twitter disabled status updates in the timeline of a following user, if the @reply user is not itself a friend of that user. That’s a bummer, as it basically does not allow me to find new groovy users.
So what I did instead now is this: every 5 minutes, I pick two random users out of the existing friends list. I get up to 200 tweets from these users, apply the same groovy pattern matching to filter out the groovy tweets and then log the @replies in those groovy tweets. This is running for the first cycles right now and based on the results I plan to then have another cron job (probably every hour) that checks how many times a twitter screen name was mentioned in groovy tweets. Above a certain treshold, I plant to start following that user automatically. But till then, I want to monitor this a couple of days longer.
GORM-JPA Plugin: I must admit I am stillusing plain Grails 1.1.1 and the app-engine plugin, but GORM-JPA should for sure be the future for using Grails as close as possible to the original promise (with GORM) on GAE/J. I will probably create another litle test app just for trying out GORM-JPA and then modify the existing code once I know it works fine.
