Facebook Application Development with Graph API Cookbook

Over 100 recipes to create your own exciting Facebook applications at an incredibly fast pace with Facebook Graph API.

• Dive headfirst into Facebook application development with the all new Facebook Graph API.
• Packed with many demonstrations on how to use Facebook PHP and JS SDKs
• Step by step examples demonstrating common scenarios and problems encountered during Facebook Application Development.
• Houses an exquisite collection of ready to use Facebook applications.

In Detail

With a user base of nearly 600 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.

Facebook Application Development with Graph API Cookbook covers 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 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. It begins by exploring the Facebook application registration and discussing the verification and authentication technique. It then takes you through the various ways in which you can use Facebook Graph API for interacting with users such as posting on a user’s wall, tagging a user in a picture, etc. Accessing complex Facebook user data by formulating a series of queries, doing client side scripting and incorporating Facebook Dialog interface are some other features that have been incorporated in this book. Integration of various Facebook Social Plugins such as the like box in your web page has also been discussed. Further you will get to know the concept of virtual currency and how to programmatically derive Facebook analytics data. As the book progresses, you will learn to use and integrate many more advanced features in Facebook application development. The book contains ready to use code that can be deployed instantly. Towards the end, the book houses a variety of ready to use Facebook applications so as to help readers derive their own applications from them.

What you will learn from this book

• Install Facebook PHP SDK and register your Facebook application
• Obtain access token and perform session validation for current Facebook user
• Work with the newly launched Facebook Graph API
• Get an insight into the core of Facebook application development such as creating a post on wall, publishing pictures, tagging users, etc
• Connect to Facebook Social Graph by using Facebook PHP and JavaScript SDKs
• Leverage Facebook Query Language in order to obtain complex Facebook user data
• Use Facebook Dialogs to enhance user experience
• Power your websites with Facebook Social Plugins
• Define your website content to Facebook Graph using Facebook Open Graph Protocol
• Handle transactions through Facebook Credits
• Use XFBML tags to enrich your application
• Extract Facebook application analytics data
• Create your own applications, from tip to toe, with ready to use code

Approach

Written in a cookbook style, this book offers solutions using a recipe-based approach. Each recipe contains step-by-step instructions followed by an analysis of what was done in each task and other useful information. The cookbook approach means you can dive into whatever recipes you want in no particular order. The book provides tips and tricks to the most common problems and scenarios faced in Facebook Application Development.

Who this book is written 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.