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

Time for action – retrieving info from the Page table


So how do we use it? Well, we can't request objects, of course, because we're not using an Object model – but we don't even request rows, which are their close equivalents. We request specific fields. If all we're interested in is the URLs of Pages' associated websites, we can just request results from the "website" column:

SELECT website

Next, we have to specify the table we're interested in. In this case, that's "page":

SELECT website
FROM page

Now we specify a condition to narrow down the search:

SELECT website
FROM page
WHERE name = "Facebook"

(Note that when checking this condition, we use = rather than ==, unlike in AS3.)

These three elements make up a single "query". When we run this query – analogous to compiling an AS3 – we will receive http://www.facebook.com/, as this is the value of the field in the website column in the page table, in the row whose name is set to Facebook.

Tip

It's common to see the FQL keywords typed in all capitals...