Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architecture created to provide a simple communication channel between different applications over the Internet using mainly the HTTP protocol. It is the hottest data technology nowadays. Facebook, Google, Twitter, and a lot of huge companies have adopted REST applications. With REST APIs, you can read, post, and delete data.

Twitter has a specific format to spread its data on the Web in order to create great integration with different kinds of applications that consume its service. According to Twitter Developers Documentation available at https://dev.twitter.com/rest/public, Twitter REST APIs provide programmatic access to read and write Twitter data. You can author a new Tweet, read an author profile or follower data, and more. The REST API identifies Twitter applications and users using Oauth, and the responses are available in JSON.

Before beginning to code the Magento extension, let's create an account on Twitter Developer to authenticate our new application on the Twitter platform.

Create a new account in Twitter (https://twitter.com/) if you don't have one and access the Twitter Developer page (https://dev.twitter.com/), as in the following screenshot:

We have a lot of options on the developer's website, such as gathering real-time data, crashlytics, and mopub. I strongly suggest that you take a good look at these tools later.

So, let's create a new application to consume Twitter services. Access the URL https://apps.twitter.com/ to create a new Twitter application. In order to use Twitter's public API services, you need to identify your application by generating a token and a secret key.

You can create a new application by clicking on the Create New App button and filling in the form with the following required fields:

Accept the Developer Agreement to finish your app registration and click on the Create your Twitter Application button.

You can access your application's configurations by clicking on the name of your application. Later on in this chapter, we will discuss how to get the right credentials to integrate our application with Twitter.

Now, we can finally start our Magento 2.0 extension solution.