Twitter API Question posted in
The official Twitter API documentation can be found here.

NodeJS with ExpressJS – Twitter API

I’m trying to learn ExpressJS and NodeJS to use with the Twitter API. This is my setup so far:

package.json

{
  "name": "twitter-express",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "server.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo "Error: no test specified" && exit 1"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC",
  "dependencies": {
    "express": "^4.16.3",
    "hogan-express": "^0.5.2",
    "twit": "^2.2.9"
  }
}

server.js

var express = require('express');
var server = express();

server.set('port', process.env.PORT || 3003);
server.engine('html', require('hogan-express'));
server.set('view engine', 'html');

server.get('/', function(req, res) {
   res.render('index', {title: 'Twitter', data: theTweets});
});

server.listen(server.get('port'), function() {
   console.log('Listening on port:' + server.get('port'));
});

var Twit = require('twit');
var theTweets = [];

var T = new Twit({
   consumer_key: '',
   consumer_secret: '',
   access_token: '',
   access_token_secret: ''
});

var params = {
   q: '#nodejs',
   count: 10,
   result_type: 'recent',
   lang: 'en'
}

T.get('search/tweets', params, getData);

function getData(err, data, response) {
   var tweets = data.statuses;
   for (var i = 0; i < tweets.length; i++) {
      theTweets.push(tweets[i].text);
   }
 }

I’m using hogan-express as template engine as I followed a tutorial. With this setup everything works and the tweets are displayed on the webpage. However, as I’m trying to learn this I have some questions about Express and Node:

If I’ve understand correctly, I need to use Express to serve the client side of my application (to display tweets on a webpage), is this the best way for a Node application or can I do it in some other way?

Do I have to use a template engine or can I use it just with html? In that case, how can I use it without a template engine? Thank you.

Tags:

3

Answers


  1. 0

    Exactly as you can observe Express(Node js framework) allow you to build a backend application or service. On client side you can fetch the API or data using Angular , Jquery or Pure Javascript. pug or Jade should be just fine as a templace engine.

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  2. 0

    Node, Express and hogan are solving different problems here.

    NodeJS is an open-source server side runtime environment built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. It has its own pros and cons but for the sake of simplicity you can consider it as a server which have many built in modules to interact with network cards, to understand http etc.
    Express is a framework for developing web applications. Frameworks are just opposite of libraries. Think of frameworks like structures which have basic wiring done and you just need to put your code/handlers at required places, and the framework will call your code/handler whenever needed. Framework makes the work easy by doing all the side jobs so that you can focus on actual problem that you are solving. You can do the things without express too, or say without any other framework but now you have to deal with a lot of things.
    For example, now you need to parse the http headers yourself, check the url, check the method type, parse the query params, then call appropriate handler to handle that particular request. Now as you can see feel that these all things are overhead and not the actual problem that you wish to solve. When using express, you get a router which takes care of all these things and call the handler that you define for a particular request. So, express is making your development faster and easier. There are many other frameworks too, like hapi, sails etc that do more or less same things.
    Hogan is a templating engine. Template engine makes your work easier in rendering the webpage. For example you can use conditionals, loops etc in your template engine only, that otherwise you need to handle using javascript. For example just consider that number of menu items on your page is not fixed, then how will you handle it ? Either you will create the html on the fly on server side only, for which you will use loops given by template engine, or you will serve the basic html and use javascript (jquery, angular etc) to update the menu.

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  3. 0

    I found a suitable soltion for Express, Node js and Jquery( Javascript Nodes and HTML

    <!DOCTYPE html>

            <head>
                <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>
                <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.min.js"></script>
                <script type="text/javascript">
                    $(document).ready(function() {
                        $.ajax({
                            type: "GET",
                            data: '{}',
                            contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
                            url: "urlofyourserver:3000/path/",
                            dataType: "jsonp",
                            processdata: true,
                            success: function(data) {
                                $('#htmldiv').html(data);
                            }
                        });

                    });


            </script>
        </head>
        <body>
            <div class="mylist" id="htmldiv"></div>
        </body>
    </html>
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