Preface

With a user base of nearly 800 million people, Facebook is the number one social networking platform. Applications can be created to interact with this huge user base in various ways both inside and outside Facebook. These applications, if developed effectively and efficiently, offer a free medium for promotion and publicity of a product or an organization.

This book focuses on both the concepts and implementations necessary to develop Facebook applications and provides ready-to-use code for common scenarios faced by a developer while creating these applications. It incorporates the newly launched Facebook Graph API along with Facebook Open Graph Beta and also presents the reader with some intuitive ready-to-use applications. This book guides the reader step-by-step, from start to finish, through various stages of Facebook application development.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Creating a New Facebook Application describes the first step towards developing a Facebook application which includes Facebook application registration process and downloading its PHP - SDK. Here, we will learn how to set up the environment and perform basic authentication to begin with Facebook application development process.

Chapter 2, Be a part of Social Graph presents some recipes to perform the most commonly encountered tasks of application development using the Facebook Graph API through PHP. Here, we will get accustomed to Facebook objects and connections and ways to use them to retrieve data.

Chapter 3, Querying Facebook demonstrates how to use the Facebook Query Language to query Facebook's humongous database for retrieving complex user data.

Chapter 4, Using FB Script shows us how we can access all the features of Graph API using Facebook JavaScript SDK such as to performing authentication and retrieving user data directly at the client side.

Chapter 5, Expressing Yourself provides an insight into Facebook Dialogs. Here, we will learn how to integrate Facebook Dialogs which provide a consistent interface to our applications. Publishing streams, sending friend requests, requesting permissions and so on will become seamlessly easy with these Facebook popup boxes.

Chapter 6, Bringing Facebook to your Website introduces us to the all time favorite Social Plugins. Here we will learn how to integrate Facebook' Social Plugins to a third party application and connect with the Facebook world from virtually anywhere and anytime.

Chapter 7, Connecting Websites to Social Graph shows the users Facebook Open Graph and ways to specify structured information about a webpage which determines how it will be rendered in Facebook. Learn all about Facebook meta tags, their uses, and how to incorporate them into your own web pages.

Chapter 8, Fiddling with Virtual Currency demonstrates how to integrate and use Facebook Credits with our application. This chapter will show us how to use Facebook Credits as a currency to sell our goods and services. It will also teach us how to handle transactions via Facebook Credits API.

Chapter 9, Creating Advertisements and Analyzing Metric Data talks about Facebook Metrices and Ads and recipes to retrieve metric data about our applications. Here, we will learn how to record statistics and understand user interaction with our application.

Chapter 10, Creating Instant Applications houses some readymade exquisite Facebook Applications. Here we will learn to develop few Facebook Applications right from scratch.

Chapter 11, Using Facebook Open Graph Beta introduces us to the newly launched Facebook Timeline and Open Graph Beta. Here, we will learn how to create Facebook objects, actions, and aggregations along with publishing user actions.

What you need for this book

In order to start with Facebook application development you should have a domain name and web hosting space. Your web server should support PHP which is a server-side language.

Who this book is for

This book is written for Facebook developers ranging from novice to expert. It uses PHP, HTML, and jQuery, the most commonly used platforms, to build applications in Facebook.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "We use Facebook's in-built XFBML<fb:comments> tag to add the Comment plugin".

A block of code is set as follows:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?
href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FPacktPub&amp;
width=292&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;show_faces=true&amp;
allowTransparency="true">
</iframe>

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?
href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FPacktPub&amp;
width=292&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;show_faces=true&amp;
allowTransparency="true">
</iframe>

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Fill in the attributes details and click on Get Code".

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