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:
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.
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.