Developing for Facebook
I’ve been developing some applications for Facebook lately. I got past the first couple of blocks fairly quickly and now have an application mostly working.
Of course there are always more issues. I expect many of these issues are typical for anything that is delivered as a service developer platform. The Amazon developer platforms are more back-end technology so its a bit easier for them to tackle some of these things.
The biggest issue so far is in general development process and staging. Since my application integrates with the Facebook UI and social features, its not entirely clear how to best manage those aspects. I usually maintain two copies of my web-sites, one that is the active public one and another private copy that I’m using for development and testing purposes. Actually there are usually 3- active development usually goes on using a local server on my workstation. The staging server typically doesn’t have anything that is especially secret, but it isn’t something that I’m worried about crashing/returning exceptions if something is not fully debugged.
With Facebook any site that working on needs to be something that can be accessed on the public Internet by their servers so the local developer-workstation test environment does not work at all.
So far I’ve managed without a seperate set of staging servers. Since my app is not yet open to the public, I don’t need to worry about breaking real users. But once I open the application up, I’ll need to deal with this. I assume I need to just register a second copy of the application with a different host header. The Facebook platform makes you use absolute URLs for everything which makes this a bit of a pain but I’m sure its something I can manage.
Since I can’t directly debug on my workstation as easily as normal (I could use remote debugging to the server but there are assorted reasons I don’t want to do that) I’ve had to rely on logging more for debugging. I’m using a “tail” utility for Windows that lets me display the log output in a window in real-time.
I’ve also signed up a second account to use as a test account to test the collaboration aspects. Of course this means I had to turn off the “developer mode” so the other account can access my application, and this in theory means that others could access the application. For now I just put in a server-side block so only those two accounts can get into it. Still, it wouldn’t be ideal if I really cared about stealth.
More on some techniques I’m using in the application itself soon. This platform is pretty new so there is only limited and scattered information about it around the web. I’ll try to collect some links here and post any tips I run across. I’m sure some of my suggestions will be wrong, but as usual I’m open to feedback and suggestions.