Spark Streaming and Twitter Sentiment Analysis

This blog post is the result of my efforts to show to a coworker how to get the insights he needed by using the streaming capabilities and concise API of Apache Spark. In this blog post, you'll learn how to do some simple, yet very interesting analytics that will help you solve real problems by analyzing specific areas of a social network. Using a subset of a Twitter stream was the perfect choice to use in this demonstration, since it had everything we needed: an endless and continuous data source that was ready to be explored. Spark Streaming is very well explained here and in chapter 6 of the ebook "Getting Started with Apache Spark," so we are going to skip some of the details about the Streaming API and move on to setting up our app. Let's see how to prepare our app before doing anything else.