Twitter's public API is both powerful and flexible. It has many features for both posting and consuming tweets. Our application needs to receive and process tweets in real time. Twitter's streaming API was designed to solve this problem. In computer science, a stream is a sequence of data elements (in this case, tweets) made available over time.

The streaming API is explained in detail at https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/overview. To use it, an application first creates a connection to Twitter. The connection remains open indefinitely to receive tweets.

The Streaming API offers several ways to choose which tweets your application receives. Our topology uses the so-called sample stream, which provides a small subset of all tweets arbitrarily chosen by Twitter. The sample stream is intended for demos and testing. Production applications generally use one of the other stream types. For more information about the available streams, refer to https://dev.twitter.com/streaming...