Publishing a Simple Facebook Application - facebook

I have created a game for Facebook using HTML, CSS and Javascript, which is nearly ready to be published. The only features I have left are allowing the user to post their score to their wall and publishing both their and their friends' high scores. Every tutorial or guide I've found for Facebook seems to be outdated and too unnecessarily complicated. I'm completely lost as to what's the best approach to achieve my goals. Could anybody point me in the right direction?
Thanks.

Congrats, you've discovered how often Facebook has changed their API. I would suggest following the Javascript tutorial. It's probably the most straight forward, best user experience, and most future proof.
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/javascript/
Essentially you are looking for 2 functions. FB.init and FB.ui.
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/javascript/FB.ui/

Brent's answer was good, but what I ended up using was TapJS. TapJS is an online JavaScript game hosting platform which offers Facebook integration.

Related

soundcloud: Is api-v2 allowed to be used and is there documentation on it?

yea, the title pretty much sums it up. Is it allowed for an app to access ressources on api-v2.soundcloud.com?
Is there any documentation for it?
Relevant since I'm currently working on a soundcloud app and I just recognized that most of the calls on the websites itself are done with api-v2. The responses from the server would be extremly helpful to build some kind of infinite streaming which is the feature I like most about soundcloud.com.
I cant speak for SoundCloud, but gryzzly (a former SoundCloud engineer) stated in a previous answer:
Letting you know, that using undocumented APIs is not going in line with the our developers’ Terms of Use.

Possible to have Facebook review a concept before building it?

We're building a piece of functionality that will require approval for users to mention friends in posts from our app.
It's quite a complex piece of development and we're not 100% sure if Facebook will approve it, so rather than spend ages coding it only for it to be rejected by Facebook we're looking for a 'leaner' approach and wondered, is it possible to describe our concept and the action in question (in slides and description paragraph) to see if they approve it in principle first? Then obviously we'd have to build the full version of it for them to approve it for use.
Anybody got any experience of this?
First, describe your features in the official Facebook Developers group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/fbdevelopers/
If you don´t get any good answer, you may need to create a prototype with basic functionality. Design implementation is irrelevant, just create the part that´s relevant for review and explain what you want to do with videos and screenshots. It must be functional though.

Why use WebMatrix Facebook helpers verus just using facebook generator?

I am wondering why would you use the html helper for something like the like button
then using the generator from facebook
Why use the Twitter helper, or the Gravatar helper for that matter? Or any helper?
WebMatrix is targeted at an audience of learners. This group is barely assumed to know HTML (although I realise that description covers a lot of experienced Web Forms developers too), so providing a reasonably consistent set of APIs to help make use of social networking widgets makes sense to me. It means that the learner can have Twitter feeds and Like buttons on their first site in a few seconds, rather than having to trawl all over the Internet to find out how these things are done, and then potentially getting confused by the developer material offered by these sites. If they achieve a degree of success early on, they will more likely persist with the framework.

Using a facebook page as a content management system?

Greetings,
So I am making a website for a friend who wants to be able to make posts onto his facebook page, have these posts (only by him. and preferably their assorted comments) be pulled in on his website.
I haven't done any work with facebook's api before, and I'd most likely be writing this in PHP (maybe wordpress?) but I am open to other languages / frameworks depending on what is appropriate.
possibly too heavy for your requirements, but check out the (free) Community edition of the Liferay portal server and the facebook portlet in particular. I'm not saying it is what you want, but if it supports your requirements out of the box with no coding and a little configuration it may be worth a look.
You might be interested in using Drupal with the Drupal Facebook module: http://drupal.org/project/fb It takes a lot of pain out of dealing with the fp apis, and you can quickly and easily build a site that has a Facebook application aspect to it. You can also write custom modules for Drupal Facebook to extend it into areas of the FB api that it does't utilize.

New Facebook app - FBML or iFrame? [closed]

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Closed 11 years ago.
We're starting a new facebook app (incidentally in Rails), and are faced with the decision to use FBML or to use IFrames. It seems like in the past the consensus generally was that FBML was the better way to go, as it made things more inherently Facebook looking, however it seems now like things on the iFrame side are starting to improve, with one of their main engineers saying we should use iframes
So I'm wondering what have people found to work best. What benefits and drawbacks have you seen with either the iFrame approach, or the FBML approach.
Or, are people using a mix of both. I see there's a way you can override the setting in specific places.
UPDATE:
For new readers, Facebook has stopped allowing new FBML applications. All new Apps should use IFrames.
I have been developing a facebook app for the past several months, and recently switched our canvas page from FBML to an IFrame. The main reason for doing so has to do with these posts and features:
Lead Facebook Engineer Recommends Developers Use IFrames for Speed, Convenience
XFBML - Facebook Developer Wiki
Basically, you can now embed FBML into an IFrame canvas using the XFBML features that were implemented to support Facebook Connect. IFrames may have performance improvements (although those are probably trashed by the client-side requests required by XFBML, which are a little tedious to set up at first), but the main advantages for me are:
1) The ability to use jQuery or any other stuff I want.
2) Useful, relevant ads from adsense, since I no longer have to embed the adsense javascript in its own IFrame.
Once I made this switch, I realized that I was able to get all the facebook data I needed through the API, and take advantage of memcached to improve performance. So, now my canvas is just plain old HTML, without any XFBML.
Hope this helps.
I find FBML easier if you want to make your app look just like Facebook with less effort in duplicating their styling.
Iframes of course give you more control.
So which do you prefer - quicker development or more precise control over the results?
The answer is iFrame for sure. Facebook has phased out the usage of FBML by the end of this year 2010
Seriously, you need to refer to this link before you decide to go with FMBL any further. Facebook will stop allowing new FBML applications by end of 2010. All Tabs Page and Canvas Application will be transition to iFrame apps, no more FMBL, and say GoodBye to FBML!
http://developers.facebook.com/roadmap
Well, I'll have to agree with the poster above me and say that FBML makes it much easier to create a facebook-ish style to your application without having to rip off CSS pages ;}
Its also quite great working with the fb tags instead of creating makeshift solutions at times.
Both ways are good, but FBML tends to contribute to more effective and efficient development for Facebook.
So, in the general case, I would probably go ahead and use FBML, unless you have some specific need for IFrame fine tuning.
To sum up:
FBML makes better and more integrated applications.
IFrame is easier to use and gives you more freedom with development (If your application is already sort of completed and you just want to add a "facebook leg" to it - it's very easy.
IFrames seem to work better if you have a client side using Flash or Silverlight. I couldn't get FBML working with a Silverlight client but when I switched to IFrames it worked fine.
I've developed about 30 Facebook apps over the past few years, almost all FBML based. I've also done some Facebook Connect implementations, which is really what you are doing with an iframe app.
By creating an iframe based app, it's not too much extra work to implement Facebook Connect for the main website, if there is one. Your content also isn't sanitized, so you can used standard html, css, and javascript without worries.
On the flip side, you can still only use FMBL/FBJS for the tab content for any application. FBML apps also have the added advantage of being able to do server side processing on initial page load. With an iframe, you need to gather the information client side, then pass it to the server. For example, Preload FQL is a bit more complicated with iframe apps than with FBML apps.
Facebook has announced that they will discontinue the support for FBML sometime soon. So, if you're thinking about developing a long a term project I would definitely start with iFrame. You don't want to go through a change from FBML to iFrames later, it's just a pain.
However, I personally think that iFrames are a lot more buggier than FBML currently, so I'd assume it'd be a while before facbeook stops supporting FBML.
In theory, iFrames is better, because you don't technically lose anything. In addition you can do a lot more things in iFrames that you can't do in FBML. But in practice, like I said, iFrames still contains a lot of bugs.
Using FBML gives you much deeper integration with Facebook as a whole.
mum. With all that said, how come no one has tackled/reacted to the fact that FBML will be obsolete in less than 2 month, no more applications will be able to be built with it, meaning that all the issues with Iframes not being as connective as FBML has been or will be handled. It seems like moving towards the Iframe is the only logical choice, because eventually FBML will not be supported at all.
I found a solution to create an iframe application without being a facebook developer . It's very powerful:
http://www.facebook.com/iframe.apps