Building a Twitter datasource

In this recipe we will learn how to implement our own datasource by providing a way to read from and post messages to a Twitter account.

Getting ready

We will integrate this datasource with OAuth, which is an authentication mechanism supported by Twitter. To do so, we will use a class named HttpSocketOauth developed by Neil Crookes, which is an extension to CakePHP's own HttpSocket class that adds OAuth support in a clean and elegant way. Download the file named http_socket_oauth.php from the URL http://github.com/neilcrookes/http_socket_oauth/raw/master/http_socket_oauth.php and place it in your app/vendors folder.

There are other ways to communicate with an OAuth provider such as Twitter, most noticeably using the PHP OAuth library available at http://code.google.com/p/oauth-php. This recipe uses Neil's approach for its simplicity.

Let us continue by creating the Tweet model. Create a file named tweet.php and place it in your app/models folder with the...