Facebook Application Development Course

I'm Jesse Feiler. Welcome to the tutorial on Developing Facebook Applications. I'm going to start by telling you a little bit about this course; what we'll cover and what we assume that you know and don't know. First of all, we are going to assume that you have a Facebook account and that you have some experience using Facebook. If you don't, sign up now for a Facebook account. As we proceed through the course, you'll see how to develop an application that runs on Facebook as this one is doing. I'm at a URL on Facebook for an application. It's one of the ones that I wrote that I'll be talking about in this tutorial. You'll see if you're used to Facebook, years ago you may not have been around or watched some of the innovations in Facebook. Facebook has been gradually exposing more and more content to people who aren't even logged into Facebook. Notice that I haven't logged in here. I'm invited to sign up, if you haven't signed up already, I'm invited to log in but I can get to parts of some applications from the outside world and this is one of them where we will talk about specifically how you prevent people from getting beyond a certain point in the application without signing in. The text here, it says Hi Facebook User. If I had logged in, it would greet me by name. So this is the type of application that we're going to talk about. There will be many other types of applications but we'll show you how to build these. Now, in order to build them, you're going to need a couple of things. You will need a development environment on your computer and for this particular application, I have a folder here called Main Street Pics, that's the name of the application and I have some folders here on my computer where I keep the source code. Now, I also have a server that I can upload those files to and you'll see in the folder on the server I have a Connections Folder and a Facebook Folder, just as I do here. It mirrors it because I develop on my computer and then on the server, the files are loaded and Facebook will access them not from my computer, but from the server. I'll show you how to do all of that, how to set that up. Inside one of the files, actually the file that is running to produce this page over here, what we will look at is I'll show you how to integrate PHP code such as this with HTML code such as this and with Facebook's extension to HTML, which they call FBML. This is, it looks a lot like HTML but it's Facebook FBML. This is plain old HTML and this is PHP code. We use a lot of PHP code in Facebook and there's a standard file structure that we use. I'll talk about all of that. So get ready. First of all, if you haven't joined Facebook, join Facebook, log in, refresh your memory if you haven't used it for a while, make certain that you have somewhere available to you, a web server that can host your application because your application is going to send this information in the middle of the Facebook window up to Facebook and its users. In addition, make certain that you have something that you can use to edit these files. I am using DBEdit because I happen to like it very much but whatever you use, it could be Dreamweaver, depends on what your preference is. To me it's very important that PHP code be and HTML code for that matter, be color highlighted. It will allow you very quickly to catch certain keystroke errors. I like the color highlighting and you can change it. But to me that's the essence. That's why I don't just use a plain, old text editor. So make certain you have something to edit your PHP and FBML files. Make sure you know your way around Facebook at least to start and make sure that you have a web server where you can host your files. And at that point we're ready to start.  

Download WorkFiles