Book Image

Facebook Graph API Development with Flash

By : Michael James Williams
Book Image

Facebook Graph API Development with Flash

By: Michael James Williams

Overview of this book

The Facebook platform provides you with an ideal solution for building rich, social experiences on the web to develop an effective user experience application. Combined with Flash which effectively enables social interactions, you can create a fully functional application on Facebook. If you've been waiting to get started with your own applications and games on Facebook, with this book you don't have to wait any longer.This book takes you through everything you need to know to integrate your AS3 apps and games with Facebook accompanied by illustrative screenshots and short quizzes.It presents you with in depth coverage of the key underlying concepts such as creating a basic application that runs inside Facebook and exploring the Graph API which greatly simplifies how developers can retrieve data. This book also covers topics on security, permissions and authentication features on Facebook.This beginner's guide starts off by teaching you about retrieving simple public data and then rapidly working your way up to authenticating users, building powerful searches across the entire database, and uploading photos and other content. Throughout the book, you'll learn by building two fundamental components: an RIA Facebook interface and an AS3 SDK that you can drop into any project to add Facebook integration. This easy-to-understand guide has everything written as AS3-only projects with publicly available components, so you can follow along whether you use Flash Pro, Flex, or MXMLC – as long as you know AS3! This hands-on tutorial will present you with a whole new perspective of the three core aspects of Facebook – searching, retrieving, and updating the data .This practical book focuses on how to set up an application on Facebook and how to deal with different contexts like AIR.By the end of this book, you will be confident enough to set up your own application and create social interactions for users to share on Facebook.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Facebook Graph API Development with Flash Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Getting your application out there


All the development work you've done is pointless if nobody ever uses your application.

If you've created a Flash project that only uses Facebook as an extra feature – a Post To Facebook button, for example – then this section will not be too relevant. But if your project is built around Facebook, with the Graph API at its core, or perhaps even embedded in Facebook, then you will benefit from making it visible on the Facebook website.

Editing the application's profile page

First impressions count. If you want people to use and install your application, you need to impress them with your application's profile page.

Here's an example of a lame profile page:

The page gives you absolutely no indication of what the application is about, or why you should bother using it. It doesn't exactly look like the developer has put much effort into the page, so why should the user believe that the application is any better?

Compare it to the profile page for Graffiti (http:...