Saturday

Tweeting from OFM SOA!

After getting a Twitter Account and following a couple of Tweeters, it struck to me that I can use this simple yet efficient technology to make my work life easier.

On a day to day basis, over 1000 email notifications from various integration projects arrive to the mail box, out of which 10% of the notifications are significant; for example, notification that the critical bank feed went fine, the long running nightly scheduled job succeeded, etc,. To pull out the important ones on the go, on a smart phone, is tedious.

Traditional method: All the notifications are emailed to the mail box, without any priority.

Tweeting method: The significant notifications are tweeted to your smart phone, where as the others (along with the tweeted ones) are still emailed to the mail box.

A tweet of the notification will contain only the important data and the same notification is mailed with all the details. This way the important message is delivered fast and available for quick view and its details available in the mail (just like in the traditional method).

With all the technology, it is as secure as it can get. The tweets are sent out only to the followers, who are monitored by the tweeter. The tweeter permits as to who can be the followers.

Implementing Tweet as a Web Service

Java API for tweeting provides methods to publish tweets to the twitter account. Twitter4J is one such API. The Java API can be encapsulated in BPEL and deployed as a Web Service on Oracle Fusion Middleware SOA Suite. The Web Service would be deployed as a common service and invoked by other orchestrations to send tweets.

Architecture view

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


 
A common Twitter account is created for the group. In this prototype the account name is “ofm2tweeter”. Users with their own Twitter accounts become ‘followers’ of this account and view the tweets.

Security of the account and the tweets is important since the account will be on the internet domain. The account is restricted so that its visibility in the internet is restricted. The users ‘follow’ requests are verified by the Twitter account admin before allowing them to follow the account. Even the tweets are invisible to the public except for the approved followers

The Tweet Web Service
The Tweet Web Service “Tweet_BPEL_WS_V1” is built as an asynchronous BPEL service, and invoked by other orchestrating services. The service receives the message to be tweeted from the invoking services. It uses the twitter4j factory classes to make a connection to the twitter account and posts the tweets. The service responds back with the status of the tweet.

Here is a view of the BPEL implementation.




 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The users who follow the Twitter account get the tweets on their smart-phones or on their web accounts. Here is view of trial tweets viewed on Twitterrific application on iPhone.














Summary
Twitter makes following the notifications easier. An organizations’ biggest concern is information security, which is taken care by account settings, monitoring and administering the followers by the Twitter account administrator.

Tweeting is cool!

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