Facebook Application Development Overview

Dec 18, 2008 by d0rr    1 Comment     Posted under: Facebook App

With the increasing popularity of Facebook as the leading social networking site, it is hard to deny that Facebook currently being among the few top visited website in the Internet. It would be interesting to check out the statistic published by Facebook themselves. Among the few notable ones (to date) are:

• more than 140 million active users,
• 2.6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
• more than 660,000 developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries

Having such a huge database of (real) users, amount of time spent on Facebook and with participation by such amount of developers and entrepreneurs, it means significant potential for the online advertisement sector.

Being a web developer, I am looking closely at how developing Facebook application can bring profit (and fame). At time of writing this article, Facebook allows applications to have their own advertisement banners and elements residing within the application canvas. This means another profit channel. And imagine 0.1% of total active users installed your application, and 10% of them uses your application daily, that will mean 140,000 page views per day.

I spent a few days before I finally figured out how to compile the bits and pieces of information out there, and I thought it would be great if I can share them with you while having it as a reference for myself.

Apparently working with PHP(5) and MySQL would be most recommended, but other languages (ASP, ASP.NET, Perl, Python, Ruby and Rails) and databases (MSSQL, Oracle) are made possible too by third parties. Don’t believe in those setup-your-first-Facebook-application-in-5-minutes, or you-dont-need-to-know-programming-to-create-Facebook-application kind of craps. The fact is, you have to be proficient in server side scripting before you even need to think further.

At times, you will also need to know Facebook Markup Language (FBML) too if you are developing Facebook application in canvas mode (You have the option to develop your application in canvas and iframe mode, but ifram simply looks retarded and shows no direct integration, that’s not what we want when we develop Facebook application!)

Requirements

• Facebook account (of course…)
• Web hosting server with database (unless you do not want to store feeds at your side)
• Server side scripting knowledge (PHP in my case)
• Interest (yes, and patience too! it can be tedious at times, and helps suggested by Google may not be revelant to the latest API sometimes)

Getting Ready

After you have got all the requirements set, you can start with adding the Facebook Developer application in order to set up your new application. I believe the step by step instruction provided by Facebook is clear and easy enough, so I will skip that part.

Once you have got your application set up, API key and Secret key are two important keys that you will need whenever your application calls the Facebook API.

Trust me, Facebook is famous because of their good usability. You can find the quick creation guide with sample code on your application page.

You may want to download the Client Library which contains all the files that make up the official PHP Client Library (/php/), as well as a sample application (/footprints/). This library will handle all API callings to the Facebook server side, and the sample application shows you how to allow users to trigger actions as well as posting notifications.

Upload the client library folder into your Facebook application root folder, and include the library (/php/facebook.php) from your Facebook application page, and you are set to develop your Facebook application!

Summary

Not too much, but I hope this will give you more or less some general overview of things you have to get prepared before you really get your hands dirty on developing a Facebook application.

Be sure to check out the references below as your extra, well, reference

I will cover more in depth on how to come out with a Facebook application in next article.

References

• Platform Documentation – all you need to know and refer when you are in doubt with API and FBML
• Anatomy of a Facebook Application – go through this before you start developing your application in order to know what you can and cannot do with your Facebook application
• Code Samples
• Test Console (API, FBML, Feed)
• Unofficial Client Libraries

Got anything to say? Go ahead and leave a comment!