Here it is, many considered it inevitable after OpenSocial, and Facebook have responded by opening up their own platform. Even though the OpenSocial adopters are sticking with Google for now, I think fbOpen will catch on eventually, at least I find it the easiest platform to develop for.
The fb-open-platform.tar.gz archive contains the tools necessary to implement Facebook Open Platform — including the API, FBML (Facebook Markup Language), FBJS (Facebook JavaScript), and FQL (Facebook Query Language) — in your own environment. It also contains libfbml-1.2.0.tar.gz, which contains the essential libraries for parsing and rendering FBML.
This comes from padrenel’s blog. It discusses important things to know while getting started with Facebook application development. Must read in my opinion, helped me immensely. It discusses:
Trust me, it doesn’t feel good, but it proves a point, I made a fair game! Yes, the Indian Premier League has begun and so has my application for Facebook. Here’s how I’m doing in the fantasy game:
There are many advantages to using the shell, one is making backups. With the following code and a cron job, periodically backing up MySQL databases is a breeze.
#!/bin/sh
mkdir `date +%m-%d-%y-%Hx%M`
cd `date +%m-%d-%y-%Hx%M`
mysqldump -h localhost -u user -ppassword dbname > file.sql
South Korea and Japan are world leaders in terms of broadband penetration, costs and bandwidth. What surprises me is why most of the world’s hosts are based out of the United States.
Now, the cost of an internet connection is not just bandwidth costs, it includes hardware, technical expertise, etc. but even considering that, it might still be worth it to invest in Korea/Japan.
I understand costs for consumers and corporations will be different, but country-to-country, they run parallel.
United States, 67.23% (52,277,677)
Germany, 5.71% (4,442,041)
Canada, 3.60% (2,802,411)
United Kingdom, 3.37% (2,617,679)
China, 3.22% (2,503,430)
The rest combined, 16.86% (13,111,810)
This is virtually a U.S. monopoly. Compare this with the following chart showing average download speeds across the world.
Seems to me like one part of the internet is still stuck in the non-global 1990s. Look out for fireworks in this industry if some people are willing to make bold investments.
After researching the possibilities of porting my Indian Premier League application from Facebook to Orkut, I have begun aquatinting myself with the basics of the OpenSocial platform which Orkut uses, and these video tutorials provided by Google are an excellent tool.
We developers love it when people use our applications on social networks, but sometimes it can go a little too far, one of my friend’s profile looks something like this:
I’m pretty happy with the Google Charts API but in case you’re looking for even more graphing solutions for your website, there are two that are more advanced:
PlotKit is a Chart and Graph Plotting Library for Javascript. It has support for HTML Canvas and also SVG via Adobe SVG Viewer and native browser support.
Flotr comes from Plotr, which itself was derived from Plotkit, here’s the official description:
Flotr is a javascript plotting library based on the Prototype Javascript Framework (version 1.6.0.2 at the moment) and inspired by Flot (written by Ole Laursen).
Flotr enables you to draw appealing graphs in most modern browsers with an easy to learn syntax. It comes with great features like legend support, negative value support, mouse tracking, selection support, zoom support, event hooks, CSS styling support and much more.
Both are nice solutions, PlotKit itself derived from an older library called CanvasGraph. If you know others, do mention them in the comments.
Joe Hewitt has created a user interface library for Safari web applications of the iPhone.
Put simply, its a way to create websites that are compatible with the iPhone look. Vladimir Olexa of CNET has already put together a rather neat looking adaptation.
Get the source code here and start tinkering away.
