Facebook Integration Points

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 with that done, we can move on to actually building the application itself.

Summary

In this chapter, we've looked at the Facebook Platform and learned that it consists of three elements that must be used by your application to interface with Facebook:

• The Facebook API—A library of PHP methods that will enable your application to extract data from Facebook.
• FBML—The Facebook Markup Language—used to obtain and format Facebook data.
• FQL—The Facebook Query Language—used to extract information directly from the Facebook database.

Each of the platform elements can be used in the development of your application, but you don't need to develop an application in order to test them out. For that you can make use of:

• The API Test Console
• The FBML Test Console

Before you can start developing your own application, you will need to download the Facebook Client Library, and if you're using Windows, then you'll need to obtain suitable software for uncompressing it.

You have to add the Facebook Developer application. Once you've done that, you can start adding your own applications.

When setting up your application, you must give it a sensible name, and a suitable location (the Callback URL). The Callback URL must be to your own server, and don't forget to add a / at the end of the URL.

When you submit your application, you'll be given an API key, and a secret key. You'll need to use these in your application. Now, you are ready to create
your application.