3.3. Building a simple application

We’ll build a simple application for archiving and displaying tweets. You can imagine this being a component in a larger application that allows users to keep tabs on search terms relevant to their businesses. This example will demonstrate how easy it is to consume JSON from an API like Twitter’s and convert that to MongoDB documents. If you were doing this with a relational database, you’d have to devise a schema in advance, probably consisting of multiple tables, and then declare those tables. Here, none of that is required, yet you’ll still preserve the rich structure of the tweet documents, and you’ll be able to query them effectively.

Let’s call the app TweetArchiver. TweetArchiver will consist of two components: the archiver and the viewer. The archiver will call the Twitter search API and store the relevant tweets, and the viewer will display the results in a web browser.