Configure the CData JDBC Driver for Twitter in a Connection Pool in Tomcat

The CData JDBC Drivers support standard JDBC interfaces to integrate with Web applications running on the JVM. This article details how to connect to Twitter data from a connection pool in Tomcat.

Connect to Twitter Data through a Connection Pool in Tomcat

1. Copy the CData JAR and CData .lic file to $CATALINA_HOME/lib. The CData JAR is located in the lib subfolder of the installation directory.
2. Add a definition of the resource to the context. Specify the JDBC URL here.

   All tables require authentication. You can connect using your User and Password or OAuth. To authenticate using OAuth, you can use the embedded OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL or you can register an app to obtain your own.

   If you intend to communicate with Twitter only as the currently authenticated user, then you can obtain the OAuthAccessToken and OAuthAccessTokenSecret directly by registering an app.

   See the Getting Started chapter in the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.

   Built-in Connection String Designer

   For assistance in constructing the JDBC URL, use the connection string designer built into the Twitter JDBC Driver. Either double-click the JAR file or execute the jar file from the command-line.

   java -jar cdata.jdbc.twitter.jar

   Fill in the connection properties and copy the connection string to the clipboard.

   You can see the JDBC URL specified in the resource definition below.

   <Resource name="jdbc/twitter" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource" driverClassName="cdata.jdbc.twitter.TwitterDriver" factory="org.apache.tomcat.jdbc.pool.DataSourceFactory" url="jdbc:twitter:InitiateOAuth=GETANDREFRESH" maxActive="20" maxIdle="10" maxWait="-1" />

   To allow a single application to access Twitter data, add the code above to the context.xml in the application's META-INF directory.

   For a shared resource configuration, add the code above to the context.xml located in $CATALINA_BASE/conf. A shared resource configuration provides connectivity to Twitter for all applications.

3. Add a reference to the resource to the web.xml for the application. Twitter data JSP jdbc/Twitter javax.sql.DataSource Container
4. Initialize connections from the connection pool: Context initContext = new InitialContext(); Context envContext = (Context)initContext.lookup("java:/comp/env"); DataSource ds = (DataSource)envContext.lookup("jdbc/Twitter"); Connection conn = ds.getConnection();

More Tomcat Integration

The steps above show how to connect to Twitter data in a simple connection pooling scenario. For more use cases and information, see the JNDI Datasource How-To in the Tomcat documentation.