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


Facebook Query Language (FQL), provides us with a much more optimized and flexible mechanism for retrieving both specific and lengthy sets of data. In this chapter we're going to explore FQL, and use it to retrieve data from Facebook that we couldn't so easily obtain using the standard Graph API, as well as loading some more optimized versions of data that's already accessible to us through Graph API objects and connections.

FQL is database-style approach to loading data from the Facebook API. The syntax is very similar to that of SQL, which makes it inherently both more complex and more adaptable, and allows for much more precise data requests, with comparatively smaller like-for-like responses than the standard Graph API.

All of the objects available through the Graph API are represented in FQL tables, and all of the Graph API connections can be replicated with FQL queries. Objects and connections in the Graph API are simply a representation of the most common information requested...