Facebook API Developers Guide

This chapter covered the different parts of the Facebook platform. The main technologies in the platform consist of a REST API for data interchange, a language to querying information from Facebook s databases, and a language to render certain portions of the Facebook platform to users (FBML). There are additional parts to the language that are more complex, such as Facebook JavaScript, and that are useful, but they re not a core part of the platform (that is, you don t need to use FBJS to develop your applications). The chapter also touched on the client libraries, which play an important part in gluing the Facebook platform to your development language. I also showed how to create a basic, functional application that updated the user s status message. To do this, you used an FBML form, mock Ajax, FQL, the PHP client library, and calls to the API. In the next chapter, I ll kick things up a bit and show how to develop a more robust, complete application. I ll not only cover user interface design and development issues, but I ll also briefly discuss ways to monetize your application and where to go to find help when (or for you optimists, should) you get stuck. You ll use an RDBMS to keep track of user interactions, track usage with Google Analytics, and set up some useful libraries for code reuse.