Facebook Cookbook

432 Pages·2009·8.85 MB·English

Facebook Cookbook™
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Facebook Cookbook™
Jay Goldman
Beijing • Cambridge • Farnham • Köln • Sebastopol • Taipei • Tokyo
Facebook Cookbook™
by Jay Goldman
Copyright © 2009 Jason Goldman. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472.
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October 2008: First Edition.
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tained herein.
To Bianca, whose face is tops in my book. I could
do nothing without you.

Table of Contents
Contributors ................................................................ xv
Preface .................................................................... xix
1. Introducing Facebook Platform ............................................ 1
1.1 What Exactly Is Facebook Platform? 2
1.2 Skills to Pay the Bills 5
1.3 Facebook Platform Off-Facebook 7
1.4 Facebook Platform Versus Google OpenSocial 7
1.5 Saddle Up! 9
2. Ideation and Strategy ................................................... 11
2.1 Which Types of Apps Are the Most Popular? 12
2.2 Which Apps Are Most Popular? 13
2.3 Test-Driving Ideas with Facebook Polls 16
2.4 The Winning Formula for Facebook 19
2.5 Where’s the Money? 21
2.6 Google AdSense and Facebook 23
2.7 Funding Facebook Development 24
2.8 Facebook Platform Integration Points 25
2.9 Application Directory 26
2.10 Navigating the Applications Menu 31
2.11 Facebook Canvas Pages 33
2.12 Think Outside the Profile Box 34
2.13 Info Sections 36
2.14 News Feed and Mini-Feed 37
2.15 Noteworthy Notifications 43
2.16 Understanding Allocations 43
2.17 Attachments and the Publisher 45
2.18 Requests 47
2.19 Tabs 47
2.20 Guiding Principles of App Strategy 48
vii
2.21 Community Gardening 50
2.22 Finding Inspiration 51
3. Hello World ............................................................ 55
3.1 Installing the Facebook Developer App 55
3.2 Setting Up a New App 57
3.3 Hello World 66
3.4 Installing Your App: It’s All About the About Page 67
4. Architecture and Design ................................................. 71
4.1 Under the Hood: How Facebook Apps Work 71
4.2 Architecting for the Future: Open Web Apps 73
4.3 Build Now, Scale Later: Getting Real 75
4.4 Scalability 77
4.5 Language Selection As Architecture 78
4.6 Cross-Language Development with Facebook Thrift 80
4.7 The Database Is Dead! Long Live memcached! 82
4.8 Advanced Caching with Nginx and memcached 83
4.9 Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Hosting with Amazon
Web Services 84
4.10 Integrating Drupal and Facebook 85
4.11 App Design Process 86
4.12 The Facebook User Interface Widgets 91
4.13 Facebook’s Global User Interface 95
5. Setting Up Your Environment ............................................. 99
5.1 Creating a Test Account 99
5.2 Facebook Clients 101
5.3 JavaScript Client Library 101
5.4 Starting Out in PHP 103
5.5 Demo Applications 106
5.6 Developer Documentation 106
5.7 Test Consoles 107
5.8 Developer Forums: Help! 108
5.9 Facebook Bug Squashing 109
5.10 Facebook Developer Software Toolbox 109
5.11 Weekly Facebook Pushes 112
5.12 Hosting 112
5.13 Amazonian Backends: Simple Storage Solution 114
5.14 Amazonian Backends: Hosting on Elastic Cloud Computing 120
5.15 Staying Up-to-Date 123
viii | Table of Contents