Last night Facebook announced that a new version of Adobe’s ActionScript library for the Facebook Platform was released. For those developers building robust flash applications, this new library will most definitely be a welcomed upgrade. According to Justin Bishop, the new library provides “support for translations and the latest Facebook Platform APIs, like fql.multiQuery, the Comments API, and Inbox API.”
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When Facebook released their Social Analytics service last week I was extremely enthusiastic. It’s a huge move by Facebook to open up data about how many users are sharing, commenting on, liking, and clicking URLs on the site. I still am extremely enthusiastic, however today I realized a huge flaw in the system: short URLs.
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Earlier this week, Facebook announced a new tool for developers to enable them to test new implementations of Facebook Connect and to ensure that the service is always running. The tool leverages Waitr, an open-sourced Ruby library for automating internet browsers. It will automatically run browsers for you and provides an interface for quickly navigating and interacting with a web page’s various components. The point is to ensure that Facebook Connect is always working.
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In his first Facebook blog post today, David Recordon has announced the open sourcing of Tornado, FriendFeed’s real-time web services technology. As described by Recordon, Tornado is a “non-blocking Web server framework written in Python”. In addition to open sourcing many of their other technologies, Facebook is continuing to support the open source movement by providing more libraries for developers.
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Some time ago I had the good fortune to work with some developers on a Facebook application that was underperforming. Through a very robust investigation of the application, it was discovered that a large number of invalid requests were being passed to the server. It was the victim of a Distributed Denial of Service attack utilizing Facebook platform and a popular application to bring down the application.
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If you’re a developer you’ll know that one of the most important things to making efficient code is to reduce your code’s dependency on SQL queries. Rather than running 1,000 SQL “INSERT” queries for 1,000 individual items for example, it’s better to batch those items into a single “INSERT” statement. There are other methods that can be used to improve query performance as well including general query batching in which multiple queries are batched into a single request.
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Today Facebook will announce the launch of “Custom Tags”, a new feature which enables developers to extend functionality within their applications to other applications on the Facebook platform. The concept is that applications can launch their own version of FBML tags, ultimately enriching the overall feature set that developers have access to within the Facebook platform. Yariv Sadan, the engineer behind the feature, stated that “FBML is great for developing pre-built components [and we wanted to expand that functionality to developers].”
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Last week I wrote about how Facebook’s policy for widget developers was a little too restrictive. The reason was that I was ultimately prevented from making it simple for site owners to quickly implement a Facebook version of MyBlogLog. I still believe that Facebook’s policy is overly restrictive and new practices will need to be developed for Facebook Connect to proliferate. Just take a look at some of the tweets below found when searching for “Facebook Connect” on Twitter and you’ll see a few reasons Facebook Connect doesn’t already have widespread adoption.
Fortunately for me I have 8 years of self-taught web development experience under my belt. It was my job for the most part until I launched this blog last May. That’s why when I saw Facebook Connect launch for the masses, I figured that it was about time to dive in and try out some code. As many other developers are experiencing, Facebook Connect isn’t easy to implement the first time around. Once you start playing with it though you quickly begin to understand what’s going on.
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When I started to implement Facebook Connect last week I thought it was going to be quick and easy, boy was I wrong. While Facebook Connect was working as it should, the problem that I ran into was a problem that many people have run into when developing plugins for Wordpress. If you have installed WP Cache, or in my case WP Super Cache, it’s pretty much guaranteed that you’ll have issues with displaying a user’s information after they login.
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If you are a web developer you are probably extremely familiar with the javascript lightbox, a pop-up box which displays images and html within the confines of an overlay box. Facebook took lightbox usage to a whole new level but they’ve done so with an extremely clean design. If you are obsessed with clean design and want to do so easily, you might want to take a look at Facebox.
The library requires jQuery to use it but that isn’t really a big hurdle to installing it. I’ve included a screenshot of this lightbox below. It’s a simple way to make a facebook-like lightbox so check out Facebox if you are interested!
