Facebook Development

Learning Facebook Application Development

Hasin Hayder Dr. Mark Alexander Bain

Using Facebook applications, developers can add custom features to one of the most popular websites in the world. Facebook is the biggest social network among college students, and is gaining ground among professionals too. Facebook applications enable you to add new ways for users to interact with each other using Facebook. Facebook applications are written in a server-side language, and hosted on the application developer's own server. They interface with Facebook, so that they appear to users to be part of Facebook itself. This book is available for purchase at Packtpub.com Learning Facebook Application Development

This book shows PHP developers how to quickly get started building powerful Facebook applications, how to work with data stored in Facebook, including photos, and how to handle multimedia and other custom data within Facebook applications.

The book covers how to send notifications and invitations from within an application, update a user's profile, create application control panels for users, and much more.

1. Learning Facebook Application Development Author: Packt Publishing

   Learning Facebook Application Development Hasin Hayder Dr. Mark Alexander Bain About the Authors Hasin Hayder graduated in Civil Engineering from the Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology RUET in Bangladesh. He is a Zend-certified Engineer and expert in developing localized applications. He is currently working as a Technical Director

2. Getting to Grips with the Facebook Platform Author: Packt Publishing

   If you ve read even this far then it s safe for me to assume that you re already well acquainted with Facebook and given the name of this book it s also fairly safe to assume that you don t want an in-depth discussion on how to use Facebook— you just want to get on with building a Facebook application. So that s exactly what we re going to

3. The Facebook Platform Elements Author: Packt Publishing

   There are three elements to the Facebook Platform The Facebook API Application Programming Interface FBML— Facebook Markup Language FQL— Facebook Query Language We ll now spend some time with each of these elements and you ll see how you can use them individually and in conjunction to make powerful yet simple applications.

4. Facebook Markup Language - FBML Author: Packt Publishing

   FBML as mentioned previously is the Facebook Markup Language. If you ve used HTML in web pages then you ll have no problem with FBML. Even if you ve not used HTML ever you ll still have no problems with FBML. It can be used to format your information just like HTML but it also does a lot more than just formatting as we ll soon see by looking at

5. Facebook Query Language - FQL Author: Packt Publishing

   It may interest you to know that the information that you can obtain from Facebook is actually stored in a database and that s where FQL comes in. So instead of using the API methods we can query the tables in the database to obtain the information that we require. For example if you want the first name surname and birthday of each of your

6. Obtaining the Facebook Client Libraries Author: Packt Publishing

   If you re going to build a Facebook application then you re going to need access to the Facebook API and to do that you ll have to download the client libraries onto your server. In order to do this you ll need to go to the developers page— remember that you can use the URL http developers.facebook.com or use the link given at the bottom

7. Adding Facebook Developer Application Author: Packt Publishing

   You may be wondering why you need to add another application in order to create your own. Quite simply— you don t use developer to create your application— you use the developer application to add yours into Facebook. So start by going to the developer s page remember that you ll find a link at the bottom of every Facebook page or you

8. Setting Up Facebook Application Author: Packt Publishing

   Setting Up Your Application If you click on Developer in your left-hand side navigation pane you ll see a button to Set Up New Application You ll now find that you need to type in details about your application obviously . Some fields are required while others are optional. We ll deal with the required fields first. Required Fields Don t

9. Facebook Integration Points Author: Packt Publishing

   The only field that you need to fill in at this point is the Side Nav URL and this should be set to the same as your application s Canvas Page URL in the base options All you have to do now is click Submit and Facebook will create an API key for you you ll need that and the secret key when you write the code for your application And