I have used Twitter4j in past to read twitter public stream but have not used twitter hbc (which is twitter's official java library for streaming apis).
My use-case is to :
- Listen to a twitter stream based on certain filter query.
My question is ?
what is your experience with these two above library and which is more suitable for usecase like mine
Short Answer
If you want to see the tweets tweeted about your search criteria right now in real time: go for hbc-twitter4j.
If you have questions like: get me up to date what happened in the recent past about your search criteria: go for Twitter4J.
Some details why
hbc is good at network reconnecting and network error handling in the background. This gives you a stable real time stream, especially with a bad network.
This is good if you watch what happens right now for hours.
I did not find a way to select the recent days like with Twitter4J.
Twitter4J: unlike hbc, it is easy to ask Twitter4J what happened in the recent past.
Twitter4J has some maintenance, hbc does not.
Both can store the result in Twitter4J classes like Status to give you easy access to the relevant Twitter fields.