A few weeks ago I made a start on my first Rails Facebook application and after some playing around Rfacebook, what I thought was the only Facebook plugin available, I came across Chad Fowler’s Facebooker.
Here are a few handy bits of information for anyone else who’s interested in giving Facebooker a try before it’s first official release.
Firstly, hats off to Matt Pizzimenti for stepping up and releasing Rfacebook quickly after the F8 keynote but as far as I know his plugin has remained essentially a straight Ruby port of the PHP libraries. Facebooker is the Rubyist’s answer to the Facebook API and wraps the api into classes and methods that are intuitive to the typical Ruby developer. Whether this abstraction is a good thing or not has been the point of a small amount of debate but personally, I like it.
Anyway, here’s a run down of the current state of affairs.
The implementation of the API itself is now by and large complete and the developers are currently focusing on implementing the Rails side of things. When I started using it a few weeks ago all that was implemented were the basic Rails features:
- Methods to create and work with Facebook sessions.
- Before filters to check that your application has been installed in Facebook
- Ability to create an FBML mime type so you can use respond_to to separate logic in your controllers and use separate views for fbml and plain html.
Since then the amount of Rails oriented code has greatly increased. A few days ago a whole load of helpers to ease creation of FBML were committed by Mike Mangino, and just today there was a commit to address the sessions issue (because due to the way that Facebook proxies FBML canvas requests, they don’t work off the bat).
Facebooker is yet to produce it’s first official release however at this rate it seems pretty close and if you’re feeling adventurous it’s quite usable as it is. Very little material is available so far but for the time being there is at least the readme which now contains the fundamental usage information.
In addition there’s the rdoc, which I’ve put online here and will do my best to keep up to date. Things are quite quiet over at Rubyforge at the moment and it seems for now the developers are coordinating their efforts directly, but they do appear to keep their code documented well.
I’ve made quite a few notes over the course of this so I plan on putting together a few articles on the experience. My initial intention was to focus on writing apps that also exist as external applications but I’ve since decided to also put together a few general pointers on writing Facebook apps for people already up to speed with Rails, since the main well known Rails Facebook (by Stuart Eccles) tutorial is oriented more towards people new to Rails. Should there not be any significant writing about Facebooker by then I’ll put something together on it too.
