Foreword
The United States has always been leading the trend of technology. Take the issue of openness as an example. From Google Play to Facebook to Twitter, the three companies are having fun with open APIs. If it were not for openness, it is estimated that Facebook and Twitter would not have emerged as such in such a short period of time, leaving Google and Microsoft without the ability to fight back.
If you look at it from the perspective of an average programmer, Facebook only has 45 core tables, but its seeming simplicity does not affect its power. For example, WordPress has very few tables. During this period of time, I was working on Facebook App development, and there was very little domestic information. Mainly because Facebook was not accessible in China, so there were very few people doing Facebook development, and there was naturally less information.
Knowledge preparation
If you want to develop a Facebook App, the first knowledge preparation is to circumvent the wall, because Facebook is outside the wall. Don’t ask me why, you know. Then you also need some basic English proficiency. Although Facebook has simple Chinese, for developers, many things are still in English, but it doesn’t matter, it is actually very simple, and I can handle it with a weak English like me.
In fact, Facebook supports multiple development languages, including C#, Python, Javascript, Java, etc. There are official SDKs for Javascript/PHP/Python, Android and iPhone. So, if you have development experience in one of the above languages, you can do App development. In fact, I personally think that the most important thing is creativity + Html/CSS/Javascript. Developments based on third-party platforms are generally not very powerful applications, but after all, 200 million users are not guaranteed. Just picking up a small number of users will scare you to death.
OK, to summarize, you need one of the development experience in C#/Java/Python/Javascript. The official recommendation is PHP5, which is actually not too difficult. The most important thing is the basic web language, which is simple but very practical. In addition, you may need some simple Sql statements, which are not too difficult.
Apply
Apply for a Facebook account. If you already have an account, you can ignore this step.
Apply to open Developer permission. The actual Developer function is also placed on Facebook as a special App. You can click here. It seems that I did not find the entrance. Just click Agree.
Click the Set Up New Application button. At this time, Facebook will ask you to verify with your credit card or mobile phone. In fact, it is just to verify your identity, so don’t worry.
Fill in the basic information of the program. This is the name of your App. You can fill it in casually. Then just go down step by step according to the prompts, I won’t repeat them here. Tip: The program name can be the same as others, but the Canvas Page cannot conflict. In fact, the program to access Facebook is accessed using http://apps.facebook.com/CanvasPage/, so the Canvas Page is required to be globally unique. Basically, all the good names you can think of have been applied for, so just make one. The Canvas URL is the address placed on your server, because Facebook can support iFrame integration.
At this point you can get an Application Key/App ID/Application Secret. App Key and App ID are often used for verification in development. Let’s ignore the more complicated settings for now. There is just one thing. There is a Sandbox Mode in Advanced that can be selected as Enable, because you can put the program in the sandbox during the development process without others seeing it.
Demo
The API provided by Facebook can be said to be very, very powerful. I have not used the APIs of Renren and 51 yet, and I don’t know what their APIs are like. Facebook's API can directly write Sql statements. Of course, this Sql statement will undergo security review. Before writing the Demo, I will briefly introduce the composition of Facebook API.
Facebook’s API is mainly composed of four parts: FQL/FBML/Graph API/Social plugins. Social plugins mainly provide some tools to third-party websites, such as OpenID login and Like button. FBML is a variant of xHTML. If you use iFrame, you can ignore their markup language and just write it yourself. So I won’t talk about these two APIs for the time being, but mainly talk about FQL and FBML.
FQL is actually the Sql statement provided by Facebook. You can query Facebook's 45 tables through FQL. It is basically no different from ordinary Sql statements, but it does not support join queries. It can support in queries. According to my test That's probably it.
It should be noted that the content you are querying must be authorized. It does not mean that you can find all user information by just giving an Sql statement. FQL does not allow the use of * to query all fields. The name of the field must be written directly. For reference materials on FQL, please visit here.
Speaking of authorization, I have found a lot of information on this matter before. In the case of default authorization, many information such as the user's email are null. Later I found out that I need to apply for authorization. The official provides a lot of authorization instructions. Interested friends can visit here. Authorization in Javascript means adding authorization parameters to FB.login. Other development languages are similar.
As for Graph API, we can understand it as a refined version of FQL, because many times we may only need simple applications and do not need to directly check Sql statements. For example, to get the user’s friends, just use my/friends. OK, to get the user's activities, just use me/events directly. We can understand Graph API in this way. Facebook allows all content to have a unique encoding, whether it is activities, pictures, applications, user profiles, etc., and Graph API can access this information through this unique encoding. For reference materials on the Graph API, please visit here.
Finally, let’s finish the demo code. I used Javascript to make this demo. You can choose a development language you are familiar with. Here’s another little tip. If you choose iFrame instead of FBML, you can deploy the program to your local machine, and then point the DNS of your program to the local machine by modifying the Hosts file. The advantage is that you don’t have to do it every time. Modifications are uploaded to the server.
<html>
<head>
<metahttp-equiv="content-type"content= "text/html; charset=utf-8">
<title>Hello Worldtitle >
head>
<body>
<scriptsrc="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/ jquery.min.js">
![[Web front-end] Node.js quick start](https://img.php.cn/upload/course/000/000/067/662b5d34ba7c0227.png)
