After reading a couple of great articles recently I thought I’d give writing a component (or DSC - Document Service Component) for LiveCycle ES a go. For inspiration I read Mike Hodgson’s Devnet walkthrough article on how to build a component and Christoph Room’s sample for integrating LiveCycle ES with Adobe Share.

Since using the Twitter API has become the modern day “Hello World” I decided to give it a shot. After googling for 5 minutes I found the Think Tank Twitter java interface. A few lines of code and I had my class written ready for LiveCycle integration;

package com.markszulc.lc;
import thinktank.twitter.Twitter;
public class TwitterComponent {
public void UpdateTwitter(String accountid, String password, String tweet){
// Make a Twitter object
System.out.println(”****** Updating Twitter!!”);
System.out.println(”AccountID: ” + accountid);
Twitter twitter = new Twitter(accountid,password);
// Set my status
twitter.updateStatus(tweet);
}
}

I then quickly put together the XML component descriptor that tells LiveCycle ES what properties to display in the panel and how to invoke the class, compile and I was done.. all up less than 1 hour from idea to implementation!

Now anyone can invoke Twitter just by setting a couple of properties!!

Download the Twitter Component for LiveCycle ES here: twittercomponent10.zip

Next stop is to work out how to expose exception handling.. stay tuned for version 1.1..