Building Python Real-Time Applications with Storm

Chapter 4. Example Topology – Twitter

This chapter builds on the material from Chapter 3, Introducing Petrel. In this chapter, we'll build a topology that demonstrates a number of new features and techniques. In particular, we'll see how to:

• Implement a spout that reads from Twitter
• Build topology components based on third-party Python libraries
• Compute statistics and rankings over rolling time periods
• Read custom configuration settings from topology.yaml
• Use "tick tuples" to execute logic on a schedule

Twitter analysis

Most of you have heard of Twitter, but if you have not, check out how Wikipedia describes Twitter:

"an online social networking service that enables users to send and read short 140-character messages called "tweets"."

In 2013, users posted ...