❯ Guillaume Laforge

Playing with the Google+ APIs in Groovy

geek groovy

As soon as I heard about the opening of the Google+ APIs, letting us access public posts in our Google+ streams, I wanted to play with them, and integrate my posts in my social stream on my blog.

First of all, a little screenshot, where you’ll see the Google+ item at the bottom:

Now, a bit of code? Yeah, of course. First of all, you’ll need to follow the explanations of the Google+ API portal to get your own API key (I’ll hide mine in this example so you don’t use mine). Then, it’s really just a handful lines of Groovy code to get the integration goin, thanks to Groovy’s Json support.

import groovy.json.\*  
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat  
// date format: 2011-09-09T08:34:07.000Z  
def sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSS'Z'")  
// my top secret API key  
def myKey = "..."  
// that's the ID you'll find in your Google+ profile URL  
def myProfileId = "114130972232398734985"  
// and this is the URL of my activities  
def myActivities = "https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/people/${myProfileId}/activities/public?key=${myKey}".toURL().text  
// I simply parse the JSON payload  
def root = new JsonSlurper().parseText(myActivities)  
// I iterate over all the items, and print the date, the URL of the post, and the title  
root.items.each {   
    println "${sdf.parse(it.published)} - ${it.url} - ${it.title.replaceAll(/\\s+/, ' ')}"   
}