Book Image

Flash Facebook Cookbook

By : James Ford
Book Image

Flash Facebook Cookbook

By: James Ford

Overview of this book

Flash applications are popular and becoming increasingly social. With flash applications for facebook you can tap into a potential audience of half a billion existing users, their connections and affiliations, their uploaded images, posts, comments and more.The Flash Facebook Cookbook is packed with recipes for the Graph API and FQL, used for reading and writing data as well as interacting with Facebook anonymously or on behalf of an authorised Facebook User.The topics covered by the recipes in this Cookbook include working with News feeds, uploading Photos, searching for and plotting Places on a map and much more. The cookbook has recipes ranging from those that work without any authentication with Facebook to those that do, and act on behalf of a user. Packed with recipes that yield practical demonstrations of the Graph API functionality, the Flash Facebook Cookbook is an essential tool for Flash Platform developers.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Flash Facebook Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
10
Checkins and Facebook Places

Introduction


Before we can load any data through the Facebook APIs, we will need to authenticate our application, and we'll need to do this each time our Flash movie is displayed in the HTML page (or each time our AIR application is launched).

The authentication process is fairly complex, based as it is on the OAuth 2.0 protocol, but it is thankfully wrapped up nicely and neatly by the Facebook ActionScript 3 SDK, so our actual setup in ActionScript isn't too complex.

This next image outlines the major layers involved when communicating with Facebook, through the Facebook ActionScript 3 SDK, from a Flash Platform application. It doesn't comprehensively outline every interaction or capability of the platforms, but it should give you an overview of the elements involved.

Facebook authentication is built around the OAuth 2.0 protocol, which in conceptual terms means that instead of having the user enter their login credentials to our third-party applications, they'll always be entering those credentials...