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How To Build A Facebook Application

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In: Articles
By Gareth Rushgrove
Published on January 22, 2008
Facebook, as youve probably noticed, is everywhere. And with that ubiquity
comes a massive audience just waiting for your web app. Whether youre
looking to make things easier for your current users, or you have the perfect
idea for a Facebook-only application, there are a few things youll need to
know to get started.
Getting Started
In order to install Facebook applications, or indeed to write your own, you need
a Facebook account. Youll also want to install the Developer applicationthis
lets you create your own Facebook applications, as well as monitor their usage
and configure various settings. Youll also need your own web server;
Facebook apps run direct from your own serverwhich means that you can
write them in whatever language or framework you prefer. Well be using PHP
in our examples, but the principles are the same for any language.
The Facebook Platform
Facebook have done a pretty good job of documenting the fundamental
components of their platform over on their developer site. The platform
consists of three core parts:
API The API defines the various methods through which you can
interact with Facebook. If youre not familiar with the idea of an API,
take a look at some recent Digital Web articles: APIs and Mashups for
the Rest of Usand Hacking on Open APIs.
FBML Facebook Markup Language is a custom markup language
based on various bits of HTML. Its similar to Coldfusion or ASP.NETs
tag-based syntax, and is used to define the pages in your application.
FQL Facebook Query Language is SQL for Facebook. A powerful
query language for situations where there are no existing helper methods
in the API, or handy tags in FBML, to do exactly what you need.
Well be stepping through the development of a simple application which will
demonstrate usage of FBML and the API.
As well as the core documentation, Facebook also makes available a set of
useful tools and resources for developers. The tools are particularly useful for
debugging raw API calls or tweaking FQL. The resources section contains
official libraries for PHP and Java, with links to unofficial libraries for
ActionScript, Cocoa, Coldfusion, .NET, Perl, Python and Ruby, and there is
also a growing community wiki.
A typical page on Facebook is quite complicated, with lots of different
elements on the page. Via FBML and the API you can influence most of these
so its worth getting familiar with the terminology used before you get started.
If you know your Profile from your News Feed then youre good to go!
Example Application: Birthdays Book
Were going to jump straight in to a full-blown application rather than start
with a simple, but pretty useless, Hello World example. The application is
called Birthdays Book, and its going to provide you with a list of your friends
on Facebook, ordered by their upcoming birthdays.
The first thing youll want to do is set up your web server with the relevant
Facebook client for your preferred language or framework. Our examples are in
PHP so we want the official PHP library files.
Next youll want to create a new application from the Developer
application you added to your Facebook profile earlier. Just click Set Up New
Application in the top right corner of the application page to get started. The
next page has lots of hidden fields that youll need to fill in. Click Optional
Fields to get started. (Obviously you should replace the placeholders with the
location and name of your own application.)

Field Value
Callback URL http://www.yoursite.com/yourapplication
Canvas Page URL My Example Application
Can your Applications be added on Facebook? Yes
Post-Add URL http://apps.facebook.com/yourapplication
Developer Mode Yes
Side Nav URL http://apps.facebook.com/yourapplication
Private Installation Yes

Note that some of these only appear once youve answered certain questions.
Well tick Developer Mode and Private Installation while were developing
our app so as to avoid prying eyesyou can un-tick these once youre ready
for others to see and install your creation. There are lots of other settings you
can tweak and information you can add, but this is a good starting point for our
simple application.
Building The Application
On this occasion were only going to have one page in our application, but its
still good form to move common behavior and configuration into a separate
file. We start out by including the client library and setting our API key and
application secret (password). You should be able to get these from the My
Applications page after you have set up your new application.
<?php
// Include the Facebook client library
require_once ('client/facebook.php');

// Set authentication variables
$appapikey = 'YOUR_API_KEY';
$appsecret = 'YOUR_APP_SECRET';

// Create the Facebook object
$facebook = new Facebook($appapikey, $appsecret);
We also set the url for where we are storing our code:
$appcallbackurl = 'YOUR_URL';
In order to use this application youre going to have to be logged in to
Facebook, so well include a snippet from the Facebook code samples to make
sure the current user is set up properly:
$user = $facebook->require_login();

//catch the exception that gets thrown if the cookie has an invalid
session_key in it
try
{
if (!$facebook->api_client->users_isAppAdded())
{
$facebook->redirect($facebook->get_add_url());
}
}
catch (Exception $ex)
{
//this will clear cookies for your application and redirect them to a
login prompt
$facebook->set_user(null, null);
$facebook->redirect($appcallbackurl);
}
Save the above code as config.php. Now that we have our configuration file, we
can start on our main application pagewell call this index.php. First we need
to include the above configuration file:
<?php
require_once ('config.php');
Then we need to get a list of all the current users friends birthdays, which we
will store in the $friends variable:
$friends = $facebook->api_client->users_getinfo($facebook->api_client-
>friends_get(), 'birthday');
?>
Its worth breaking this line of code down, as it demonstrates how to make API
calls using the library. Were using two API methods in order to get the
information we want: Users.getInfo and Friends.get.
(Note that the API docs do not provide details of the parameters or parameter
order required by the libraryyoull need to delve into the source code of your
chosen library to discover this information. The official libraries are well-
documented with comments so you should be able to find your way around
just remember the API method Users.getInfo becomes
the users_getinfo library method in the PHP library.)
<h1>Birthday Books</h1>
<style type="text/css">
<?php include("style.css"); ?>
</style>
FBML is basically the HTML you know and love, so well include a heading
and a stylesheet. The link element isnt permitted and the @import rule isnt
supported either, so the simplest solution is to use a server-side include. There
are some more useful CSS tips on the developer wiki. Now we start with the
bulk of our application.
First well set-up a couple of empty arrays for storing information about our
friends. Well also set a timestamp of the current day and month and store it in
the variable $now. We do this so that later on we can work out whether a
birthday has already occurred in this year. For a full list of formatting options
for the date function see the PHP date page.
<table>
<?php

$now = strtotime(date("jS") . date("F"));

$with_birthday = array();
$without_birthday = array();
We already have a list of our friends in the $friends variable so lets loop
through that. What were aiming for at the other end is an array of our friends
arranged into upcoming birthday order.
foreach ($friends as $friend) {
Well hold details of each person in a placeholder array called $person, then
place each $person with birthday information into another array
called $with_birthday. Were going to want to get at their name, their profile
picture, and details of their birthday. For ease of reference we store these
against relevant keys in the array: name, image, month, day, year.
$person = array();
$person['name'] = '<fb:name uid="' . $friend[uid] . '"/>';
$person['image'] = '<fb:profile-pic uid="' . $friend[uid] . '"
linked="true" size="square" />';
Here we have an example of the special FBML markup tags. Facebook users
are referenced by a unique identifier which is returned by various API methods.
We pass this uid value to the fb:name and fb:profile tags which return the
name and profile picture of that user. A full list of FBML tags, along with lots
of examples of usage, can be found on the wiki. Core documentation really is
one of the strengths of the Facebook platform.
$person['day'] = date("jS", strtotime($friend[birthday]));
$person['month'] = date("F", strtotime($friend[birthday]));
$person['absolute_timestamp'] = strtotime($friend[birthday]);
$person['relative_timestamp'] = strtotime($person['month'] .
$person['day']);

if ($person['relative_timestamp'] < $now)
{
// birthday has already happened this year
$person['year'] = date('Y', strtotime('+1 year'));
}
else
{
// birthday still to come this year
$person['year'] = date('Y');
}

$person['relative_timestamp_with_year'] = strtotime($person['month'] .
$person['day'] . $person['year']);
Not everyone enters their birthday details into Facebook. Well store those
people in the $without_birthday array for now. You could always do
something with this information later.
if ($person['absolute_timestamp'])
{
$with_birthday[] = $person;
}
else
{
$without_birthday[] = $person;
}
}
Now we have an array of people with birthdays we can loop through, but
theyre in the wrong order. Well use the handy PHP array_multisort function
to remedy the situation. array_multisort allows us to sort a given dataset
($with_birthdays) by one column (relative_timestamp_with_year) using
different order flags (in this case SORT_ASC, an ascending sort).
foreach ($with_birthday as $key => $row)
{
$relative_timestamp_with_year[$key] =
$row['relative_timestamp_with_year'];
}

array_multisort($relative_timestamp_with_year, SORT_ASC,
$with_birthday);

?>
All we need to do now is loop through our final, sorted array and output a table
of our friends together with their birthdays. Weve thrown in
some microformats to make it possible to export the data later:
<table>
<?php

$i = 0;
foreach ($with_birthday as $friend)
{
echo '<tr class="vevent';
if ($i == 0) {
echo ' odd';
$i = 1;
} else {
$i = 0;
}
echo '">';
echo '<td>' . $friend['image'] . '</td>';
echo '<th scope="row" class="summary vcard"><span class="fn">' .
$friend['name'] . '</span></th>';
echo '<td><abbr class="dtstart" title="' . $friend['year'] . '-'
. date('m', strtotime($friend['month'])) . '-' .
substr($friend['day'],0,-2) . '">'
. $friend['day'] . ' ' . $friend['month'] . ' ' . $friend['year']
. '</td>';
echo '</tr>';
}

?>
</table>
We now have version one of our Birthdays Book application. As a final touch,
well track how many people are using our application using Google Analytics.
We cant include Javascript in our pages, but there is a handy FBML
tag,fb:google-analyticsjust include your unique identifier from Google
Analytics in the uacct parameter.
<fb:google-analytics uacct="YOUR_ANALYTICS_ID" page="Birthdays Book"/>
The finished application can be found at apps.facebook.com/birthdaysbook and
you can download the source files at www.digital-
web.com/extras/facebook_application.
Summary
Once you have a simple app up and running the next things youll want to look
at are ways of interacting with the rest of Facebook. Take a look
at Profile.setFBML, Feed.publishActionOfUser, and Notifications.send to get
you started.
The Facebook platform isnt standing still. Look out for the new mobile
additions which allow for mobile optimised content, as well as sending SMS
messages from your apps. Even more interesting are the new Data APIs, which
let Facebook deal with the problem of scaling data storage while you get on
with developing your applications.
If you can already build simple websites you can build Facebook applications.
Being able to use your preferred language or framework really helps and the
quality of the core documentation means the best way to learn is to jump in
with your own ideas.
In the second part of this article well be taking a closer look at getting
information out of your Facebook applications and onto peoples profile pages.