GeoTweet5
GeoTweet5.com, a site I have been playing around with showing tweets in your local vicinity has just gone live. It utilises the HTML5 Geo location functionality. It was inspired by Ben Marsh’s UK Snow website and article in .NET magazine.
If your browser supports geo lookup and you grant access GeoTweet5 will try and pinpoint your location. If not you are invited to provide your current whereabouts manually. Your location is then plotted and centered on a Google map. Local tweets are pulled in using Twitter’s search API and likewise plotted on the map.
Rather than code all this in JavaScript, which is entirely possible, and probably the right way to go about it I decided to have a play around with Java. I wanted to test out how easy it was to parse both JSON and XML. I actually found working with JSON easier using the classes from JSON.org.
GeoTweet5 is a JSP/Servlet site running on Apache Tomcat.