OK - time to get our hands dirty with a real project!

We’ll be building a super-basic Twitter client that just fetches one author’s tweets from the Twitter API.

AndroidTweetGettr

This programming assignment will go in 3 stages: if you don’t get through them all in the face-to-face part of the course please continue in your own time. We’ll break them down so you can have a running app as we move forward.

The app is called:

• AndroidTweetGettr

Your new client wants an app that just fetches tweets when ever they run it from their favourite tweeter, @GretaThunberg.

The app will have your clients Twitter API key pasted into it for the MVP version, later you can have this configurable.

The app is based on a Swift project called SwiftTweetGettr which has been ported into C++ and other languages as well. The project handily lays out the service API calls you’ll need to make.

• QTweetGettr / twitterclient.cpp

We’ll be using Retrofit to handle the API calls.

App Design

Here’s the steps we’ll follow for our project:

• 1. Build the UI
     • An Activity will host a Fragment
     • Codelab on Fragments * That in turn will have a RecyclerView listing the tweets * At first we’ll have dummy data * The dummy data will be hosted ina ViewModel * It will be a LiveData<List<TweetItem>>
• 1. Create the Twitter data source
     • We’ll create a Retrofit service to fetch
     • the API token
     • and data * We’ll hook up to a TweetRepository
     • This will have a getTweets method
     • The getTweets will return a single which…
     • …will push data into the view models livedata * Twitter images will be fetched
     • using the getImage method from SwiftTweetGettr.
• 1. Cache the data into a Room database
     • When the app loads it can fetch Greta tweets from an on device store
     • No more being starved of Greta tweets when network is unavailable
     • If network is available we’ll fetch updated tweets and store them

References

• Image fetching codelab
• Retrofit
• QTweetGettr / twitterclient.cpp