Learning Facebook Application Development

Using Facebook Applications, developers can add custom features to one of the most popular websites in the world. Facebook is the biggest.
Table of contents

I will be using PHP 5 for this tut.


  • Documentation?
  • Learning Facebook Application Development.
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All code featured here will be in the index. The first step to get a Facebook API key, which allows your app to retrieve information from Facebook. Now you need to set up your canvas page name and callback URL. Your canvas page is the application area within Facebook; the name is added to the URL and will look like this: The callback URL points to the server hosting the app files. To set these up, from the "My Applications" page click "Edit Settings" on the right hand side. You will see the fields to fill in both, as I did in the screen shot below.

While there are lots of other options, none are necessary for this tutorial. Click 'Save' and you're now ready to build your first Facebook app.

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Facebook even provides you with some start up code. I've cut out the extra stuff and gave you only what you need to initialize your app This is fairly straight-forward code.

The first thing we do after that is get the user id of the logged in user. This will be valuable to us if we were do things get the user's name, the user's friends, etc. If we don't make specific Facebook calls, this is just like writing a php application. Below is our code.

Build Your First Facebook App

This is all you need to do to print to the canvas page. One thing to note is the way we create CSS. We cannot call a file like style. This is so our CSS doesn't interfere with Facebook's. You should also know that when styling divs, you can only uses class, not id. The code we created will produce something like this:.

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When so used, Facebook members can log on to third-party websites, applications, mobile devices and gaming systems with their Facebook identity and, while logged in, can connect with friends via these media and post information and updates to their Facebook profile. According to an article from The New York Times, "Some say the services are representative of surprising new thinking in Silicon Valley. Instead of trying to hoard information about their users, the Internet companies including Facebook, Google, MySpace and Twitter all share at least some of that data so people do not have to enter the same identifying information again and again on different sites.

Log in with Facebook cannot be used by users in locations that cannot access Facebook, even if the third-party site is otherwise accessible from that location. According to Facebook, users who logged into The Huffington Post with Facebook spent more time on the site than the average user. In February , Facebook began to use the hCalendar microformat to mark up events, and the hCard for the events' venues, enabling the extraction of details to users' own calendar or mapping applications.

Learning Facebook Application Development

In December , the number of users signing into the site from mobile devices exceeded web-based logins for the first time. Many Facebook application developers have attempted to create viral applications. Numerous applications created by the class were highly successful, and ranked amongst the top Facebook applications, with some achieving over 3. In , The Guardian expressed concerns that users publishing content through a third party provider are exposed to losing their web positioning if their service is removed; and the open graph could force connecting web presence to Facebook social services even for people using their own publishing channels.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. Archived from the original on Get Started with the Open Graph". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 6 July Search for technology The New York Times. Retrieved August 13, Retrieved 16 May Retrieved 4 June Retrieved 24 March Retrieved December 29, Retrieved 28 May Archived from the original on June 9, Social network analysis software Diaspora software Web 2.

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