So, my foray into the world of Facebook applications was stuck on the back burner a week or two after my last illustrious post. Would like to say I had to reprioritise but really it’s because I can never stick with coding on the same project for more than a few days and instead keep flitting around countless half finished apps to keep me safe from boredom (but completely lacking in the satisfaction of putting something into production).
The matter of routing
Still, there was a practical reason for waiting on my app, and that was because the situation with regards to routing was pretty up in the air and (I think) still is. Since I wanted to do a combined FB/non FB app my routing wasn’t so straight forward and I was struggling with the lack of clarity on how I should have been proceeding, along with what options I had and what might at the time simply not have been possible. I figured I might as well hold off for the first official release for this to be clarified.
It turns out though that this has been one of the bigger topics of conversation over the last few weeks and getting it right is involving a fair amount of discussion, the issue being clarifying, well, the sorts of things I mentioned I had – what issues are down to how people should be approaching the design of their app and what needs to be built into the plugin’s functionality.
As I said before though, despite some of these matters, Facebooker itself is quite stable and has for sometime been used in production by a good few people (including combined FB/non FB apps), I guess you’ve just got to be ready for the fact that you might have to be ready for a bit of refactoring as new code is checked in and better ways of doing things become available. All the core functionality of the API has long been implemented.
More users…
We’re also starting to see a few new faces and a lot more activity on the mailing lists, with a good few messages most days with people generally getting responses to queries within a few hours tops. I think a large part of this is the fact that Matt Pizzimenti is now promoting Facebooker to potential new users as he no longer has time to actively develop rFacebook and is likely to cease development on rFacebook once Facebooker gets it’s first official release. We’re now starting to see more blogging and tutorial writing for Facebooker too which is great and surely only going to increase over the next few months.
Some places to get started
Here are a few tutorials that have surfaced over the last few weeks which will help a new user get going.
- Joel Nylund’s a guy who’s been pretty active on the mailing lists and has thrown together a Facebooker Quick Start based on his experiences.
- Gerald Bauer who’s been blogging about rFacebook for some time has published a 10-Minute Quick Start Guide for Facebooker.
- Bryan Taylor posted his Facebooker Plugin Tutorial on the mailing list today.
Bebo support coming soon
I suppose this is the last main thing to mention is Bebo support which a good few people have expressed an interest in and a few have already started working on. I think I heard somewhere that rFacebook has already implemented this functionality so one would assume implementing this with Facebooker’s not going to be far off.
Jon, thanks for the link. I hope you have a look at your comments, looks like a lot of spam. Mephisto can hook with akismet to reduce this.
Lol, yes, just seen them and done a little housekeeping.
Think I’ve got a key somewhere from when I once used WordPress so looks like I’ll be digging that out this afternoon!