Facebook application development

I’m enjoying my first foray into Facebook app development. Unfortunately, the documentation is relatively sparse and the book I’m reading (Wrox’s “Facebook Application Development”) is not entirely helpful. Basically the process is:
1) download the PHP Client Library (http://svn.facebook.com/svnroot/platform/clients/packages/facebook-platform.tar.gz)
2) Upload it to a new folder on your server (eg “facebook”)
3) Create a blank “index.php” with just “hello world” or whatever in it.
4) Set up an application in the Developer’s centre on facebook (www.facebook.com/developers) that points at your index.php

When you then go to apps.facebook.com/[yourappname], whatever you’ve programmed to happen in index.php will appear within Facebook.

You then need to learn “FBML” which you can use to bring in details of the current user and his/her friends and for simple logic but, otherwise, you’re just programming in the normal way, on your own server and interacting with Facebook (using FBML or the API) whenever you want to update information.

Pretty simple in practice but a lot to learn.

Posted via email from Kevin’s posterous