Facebook Cookbook - Jay Goldman [28]
News
The rate at which Facebook makes changes to Platform is one of the biggest challenges in producing a book like this. Hitting a target that moves this quickly is like trying to bullseye womp rats from a T-16, if you know what I mean. Keep up-to-date with the latest schemes hatched by the Facebook team in the News section, located just below the Discussion Board. Since their announcements regularly have a significant impact on what your application can do, I recommend subscribing to the RSS feed and making it a daily read.
Marketplace
If you’re the kind of evil genius who has brilliant ideas but lacks the technical chops to build them, or the kind of brilliant developer who needs an evil genius, then cast your eyes toward the Marketplace, located below the News. Use it to post about your idea and recruit developers, or post about your mad skillz and find projects to work on.
NOTE
If you’re anything like me and your RSS reader is subscribed to more feeds than a pig farm at lunchtime, you might want to use an RSS-to-email service to make sure you are alerted when Facebook posts updates that could affect your app. Check out http://www.rssfwd.com/ or http://www.sendmerss.com/, both of which will happily send the latest posts from any RSS feed right into your inbox.
Setting Up a New App
Problem
I’m rip-roarin’ to go on my new app and have the Developer app installed and mastered. Now what?
NOTE
If you don’t have the Developer app installed, check out Installing the Facebook Developer App. You’ll also need to have hosting set up with a third-party hosting provider; if you don’t, check out Hosting for more information. For the purposes of this recipe, we’re going to use http://yourdomain.com as the name of your third-party host.
Solution
Inside the Developer app (http://www.facebook.com/developers), you’ll find a Set Up New Application button, shown in Figure 3-2.
Figure 3-2. The fabled Set Up New Application button in its natural habitat
On the Developer app page, which lists all of your apps (http://www.facebook.com/developers/apps.php), you’ll find a button that looks similar but is labeled Apply for an Application Key (Figure 3-3).
Figure 3-3. Set Up New App’s evil twin, Apply for an Application Key
Click on either button to jump into the world’s most deceptive form, shown in Figure 3-4. Sure, you could just provide an Application Name, check the ToS box, and ignore the innocent-looking Optional Fields area, but you’d be in for a nasty surprise when your app doesn’t work.
Figure 3-4. Simple version of the Set Up New Application form
Fill in the form to add your new Hello World app and get an API key, and then you’re ready to start rocking. Take the extra few minutes to complete the full form here, even if you don’t know all the details now. See the Discussion, next, for a description of each field.
Discussion
Some of the fields in the form are a little complex the first time through, so here’s a quick guide.
Base Options
Developer Email Addresses (Contact and User Support)
Pretty self-explanatory, though worth noting that important things like ToS violation notices will get sent to the Developer Contact Email, so make sure you check it regularly. You should check the User Support address too, but it might be worth having them go to separate places so you can make sure you don’t miss anything important from Facebook.
Suggested Hello World values: contact@yourdomain.com, support@yourdomain.com.
NOTE
If you don’t have a bug tracking system in place, take a look at something like FogBugz from Fog Creek Software. Not only is Joel Spolsky one of the industry’s leading brains on the development of quality software (see http://www.joelonsoftware.com), but FogBugz