Lately Ive had to do alot of research into the Facebook API or rather API’s. At the moment two API’s exist, the old Rest API and the new Graph API. If you are new to the platform and have found this review, I can tell you right now, all Facebook developers feel your pain. It is a very immature and unorganized architecture, and looks to be lacking direction for improvement.
My adventure begins with the Adobe Flash Actionscript 3.0 library dedicated to integration with the Facebook Rest API, otherwise known as ActionScript 3.0 Library for Facebook Platform. You will find that this library is extremely difficult to work with, and the documentation most certainly lacks the information needed to create effective applications quickly. Unless you follow the tutorials, you will be last from the very start. I do highly suggest you start with these tutorials and follow them step-by-step. If you are not familiar with Flex, the tutorials will be difficult to follow along with but it is easy to grab the actionscript 3 code and modify it accordingly.
At the moment, I have been able to follow the tutorials on the Adobe Developer Connection pretty well and be able to login/logout and bring in user data as a desktop and in-facebook app, using the REST API. My next step is to integrate the new data model, as it will be forced upon developers to use as of June 30, 2010. Then, I will create a simple Facebook Connect application. I’m looking at releasing my code pretty soon on snipplr.com.
I do hope that this mini-review helps those who are just beginning with the Facebook API in Flash/Actionscript 3.0. I will be writing more as I go along and releasing more code for those of you interested in acquiring knowledge into integrating your apps with the social networking world.
Please let me know more of what you would like to see, this way I get a good idea on what to do for my next written review.
Thanks!
