Issue using twitter4j

Question

I am trying to find out all the followers of a given user. I find the following code:

User u1 = null ;
    long cursor = -1;
    IDs ids;
    System.out.println("Listing followers's ids.");
    do {
        ids = twitter.getFollowersIDs("NZ_Football", cursor);
        for (long id : ids.getIDs()) {
            System.out.println(id);
            User user = twitter.showUser(id);
            System.out.println(user.getName());
        }
    } while ((cursor = ids.getNextCursor()) != 0);

The piece of code works perfectly for me. However, I have questions:

1. what is a cursor value for? Why it is -1 here?
2. It will hits the limit rate if the user's followers list is huge.
3. what is the ids.getNextCursor() for?

Answer 1

@1. The cursor value is a kind of flag if it is -1, that means there are still some followers of a particular user. The twitter API uses this cursor mechanism because it returns a set of follower IDs for each loop.

@2. Yes, but you can figure out this issue. You can create several twitter account to generate some new token stuff. Then, you can implement a mechanism that renews the token whenever rate limit shows up.

@3. It returns the cursor value of the new set of follower IDs. As far as I remember, it returns 50000 IDs per loop.

I hope I replied all you want to know well.