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Facebook - A Developer’s Perspective
To-date I have created one Facebook (CN Coverage) application and am starting work on a second so I thought I would share my findings.
I suspect this has been documented elsewhere so please bear with me while I go on and feel free to point out any areas I may have missed.
Debugging
I do a lot of my development on my local machine so I use localhost for most development work. This works great if my app is an frame application but not if its in Facebook markup. I really don't know how this could be fixed but its a real pain to have to upload to a remote machine just to test the latest feature. Perhaps someone has some sort of DNS hack that can fix this issue.
Storage
Facebook as a platform has one downfall in my eyes and that is storage. Maybe this will be fixed with the recent purchase of Parakey. The application I am developing is only creating a small amount of information to be stored and life would be really easy if I could just dump this information in to a application storage area. I might dump this info into Amazon s3 instead of creating a database just to store this small amount info. This could be a nice powerful feature if they did it correctly… just imagine if a developer could store data and the query in a database. Another thing that would be great is the ability for application developers to read other applications data if the application permissions allowed such access. It could be a whole new ball game for mashups within Facebook.
Styling
If you don't use FBML then your need to roll your own styles. If they had a simple style guide which had all the colours, fonts, styles, etc. available this would make a developer's life easier. I hate having to dig around in stylesheets and html to find this stuff.
Anyone else have any thoughts on what the Facebook platform could use work on from a developer perspective?
This article provided by Darren Stuart. Darren Stuart is a Web Developer based Devon, UK. Darren has been developing websites for 8 years and runs a web development business.
I couldn’t agree more. While I’ve built 2 test apps, and on one hand found many things easy, I’m finding other areas difficult.
You hit it on the head with needing a DNS hack to support local host development
And as for documentation … it’s difficult to find info when you need it. It took me hunting around in the source code to figure out the CSS errors I was having
I agree too. I´m new developing Facebook aplications and when I started looking for the API It was a caos because It´s not documented very well and the platform in ONLINE so it´s harder to developers test the applications, It´s harder even when I was trying to learn Django and Ruby on Rails.
Please Facebook give us a solution.
would you like some cheese with your whine? stop b$%^&ing.
true, native storage options would be nice. true, auto-styling would be nice. but honestly, give credit where credit is due. they practically single handedly created a new genre of app programming. kudos to them. i’m sure things will be getting even easier with future iterations of their spec.
Thanks for the comments guys, I don’t think anyones dening that the platform is not any good.
For the DNS I am looking at a Dynamic DNS server like this one http://www.no-ip.com/
They do a free account which looks like it will do for just routing the requests to my local webserver.
FB apps are a perfect way to waste your time. You are learning how to use a closed source proprietary platform with uncertain future.
I totally agree with the above comments. Although I’ve been only developing Applications with iframes, I see some limitation with that due to scrolling. When I see applications that are using FMBL, the height of the application is much taller which gives more freedom and space for creative work + ads ;)