Twitter's API is all based on Rails ActiveResource ... which is awesome. It turns any resource (often a database table) into a RESTful service. REST is often associated with XML, but Rails (and thus Twitter) supports it as JSON (Twitter supports ATOM and RSS as well) too. For ActionScript, XML is great. Or I should say POX is great and that is what Rails serves up.
The Twitter Search API is different. It supports two formats: ATOM and JSON. No POX. I went with the ATOM format. For JSON, I would have used Adobe's corelib. It works well, but I didn't want to add the weight. Plus, JSON tends to parse much slower in AS3 than XML. That is because AS3 implements E4X. To get E4X to work with ATOM, you have to be mindful of namespaces. For example, here is the code I used to interate over the entries: for each (entryXml in xml.atom::entry). Here the xml variable is the parsed result from search.twitter.com and atom is a Namespace object. Not as pretty as just xml.entry, but oh well.
