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Introduction
CHAPTER 1 Introducing the Facebook Platform
In this chapter, I briefly went over what the Facebook platform is and outlined some of its technologies and capabilities. I also talked about how Facebook has grown to be the second largest social network on the Web. In the forthcoming chapters, I’ll get more into the specifics of what the different parts of the platform do and how these components work together to allow programmers to develop rich applications for Facebook users. In the next chapter, you’ll work on setting up a new application from scratch, including setting up your server. There’s not much to set up before you start building your application, but you will need to pay attention to a few things in order to help in your planning and implementation stages.
CHAPTER 2 Getting Ready for Facebook Application Development
This chapter introduced the necessary steps to create a user account on Facebook, to set up your server environment, and to register your yet-to-be developed application with Facebook. It also examined some of the concepts used by Facebook in how it names the different parts of its site and some of the tools that Facebook provides to help you try different parts of the platform (the API Test Console and FBML Test Console). You also briefly looked at how the Facebook platform interprets your code to represent your program to generate HTML for your end users (the Feed Preview Console). It’s important to remember that your application is being parsed on at least two servers, the web server your application is hosted on and one of Facebook’s servers, before the information gets to your users. You can control only one of those parsers, so code efficiently! Although you technically could create a Facebook application at this point, it was worth taking a step back and looking at the terminology that the Facebook platform uses for naming elements of pages and some of the tools it provides to help you not only learn about the platform itself but also to help you debug your code! In the next chapter, you’ll take a closer look at the different parts of the Facebook platform and start getting familiar with the syntax Facebook uses. You’ll also look at some of the tools Facebook provides to help you get comfortable with the platform as well as try different parts of the platform.
CHAPTER 3 Learning Facebook Platform Fundamentals
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.
CHAPTER 4 Building a Facebook Application, Start to Finish
We covered a lot of ground in this chapter. You created an application all the way from start to finish using Eclipse, MySQL, PHP, and the Facebook platform. I discussed some of the issues you can run into when developing an application and how to deal with code that’s not behaving as expected. Although I didn’t walk you completely through the code to post reviews, you should know enough to complete this on your own very quickly (or build upon it for your own application). In the next, final chapter, I’ll go over some ways to track how many people are using your application and how you can turn this into a little extra revenue.
CHAPTER 5 Going Further with Your Application
Making a little bit of money on the side never hurt anyone, and in this chapter I briefly went over some avenues that are available to you as a Facebook developer to monetize your application. You saw how to easily integrate advertisements into your application with Google AdSense and how to use Amazon’s affiliate program to help generate a revenue stream for your application. Because Amazon and Google aren’t the only players on the block, I also listed some other advertising agencies that many Facebook developers have used. It is important, however, to compare the different agreements to each other in order to find the right solution for your application. And, if you get to the point of wanting to sell your application, I listed a few avenues for you to pursue. Remember, the vast majority of applications don’t create additional value to Facebook. If you want to sell your application, remember this altruism: Facebook isn’t about content…it’s about communication. Do something that Facebook lacks, or do it better than Facebook does it, and you’ll be successful. If you get stuck, remember that the forums and the wiki documentation are your friends. You can also drop me a line via Facebook (be sure to add me as a friend) with any comments. Good luck with your project!
