GotConnection v0.1

As crazy as it sounds with the amount of connectivity out in the wild these days there are still times when you need to do web based development when you’re not connected to the internet. This in itself isn’t usually an issue except for when you’re developing some web service integrations eg. a Twitter feed integration in a website and have no way of accessing the Twitter API. This has been the main inspiration behind this little project as I’m disconnected from the outside world for a couple of hours a day on my commute to and from work and sometimes I want to integrate with Twitter.

So I present GotConnection v0.1.

“How do I use it?”

The concept is pretty simple. You include the library into your asp.net web forms or asp.net MVC or any .net project and where you would write the code to create the web request to extract out the json from Twitter service server side you do this instead …

ITwitter twitter = GotConnection.ConnectTo.Twitter(new { option = “blah” });
var result = twitter.TimeLine(“WestDiscGolf”, 3);

The result returned is the json representation of the timeline data for WestDiscGolf and the last 3 tweets. Simples.

The interesting part comes when you are working offline and have no access to the internet. To continue to develop against the returned json data you don’t need to do any testing in code, or change any of your consuming code at all. All you need to do is update an application setting in the projects web.config file to say that the component isn’t online anymore. And that’s it.

Limitations

The only feature at the moment is the ability to get a users timeline in json format from the Twitter API. This is mainly because this is the only functionality that I require at the moment. The offline data understands the number of tweets to return, but in this version that’s it.

Future versions

I’d like to expand this project to allow for more options in the Twitter time line functionality, including support for the different formats it can return. I’d like to expand it out to other services which have read only data feeds such as blogger, facebook, generic rss/atom feeds etc. Future versions will use the Options class further. The idea behind the Options class is to allow for passing in options/defaults through as an anonymous object much like jquery defaults are set.

I’m not interested in making this a component which becomes a library to log in/out, post etc. to services such as Twitter as there are many out there already. This is purely there for developing against a read only service when you’re not online.

Where can I get it?

Well it is up on github. This is the first time I’ve uploaded any of my code to github so feel free to look around, fork the code and change it all, add in extras etc. If you do find this useful and add any extras in then please let me know and I’ll see about adding them into the main fork. Probably in the next version or 2 I’ll look at putting it on NuGet but will have to wait and see.

Any questions or issues or ideas or comments then please tweet me @WestDiscGolf

Enjoy!