Tag: facebook

Categories
Programming Web Development

Another Brick In The Facebook Wall

I ran across the problem recently trying to write to a users wall using the Facebook API. The Facebook documentation is hardly sane as it’s a mix of languages, not entirely up to date, and lacks good examples. The error messages are hardly ideal either. “A session key is required” at least leads me in the right direction. “Invalid parameter” is just unacceptable and makes me stabby.

So here’s some cleaned up pseudocode I pulled together that will hopefully be of use to others who bang their heads against the wall. This “works for me” in my limited testing over several days:

require_once(‘./facebook-platform/php/facebook.php’);
 
$facebook = new Facebook($apiKey, $appSecret);
 
// This gets us the uid
$canvasUser = $facebook->get_canvas_user();
 
// And the session key
$sessionKey = $facebook->api_client->session_key;
 
// You need both of these permission bits
$user = $facebook->require_login($required_permissions = ‘publish_stream,offline_access’);
 
// You’ll likely have an application sitting here and at
// some point in your application be doing the following
 
// Here’s where we actually set the status
$facebook->api_client->call_method("facebook.status.set", array(
    ‘uid’ => $canvasUser,
    ‘status’ => "All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.",
    ‘session_key’ => $sessionKey
));

Getting the right permissions is key.

The thing that ends up being the most confusing is the session_key. After reading the docs, I was inclined to do:

$token = $facebook->api_client->auth_createToken();
$sessionKey = $facebook->api_client->auth_getSession($token);

What you really want is:

$sessionKey = $facebook->api_client->session_key;

You can also use adapt this to use stream.publish if you’d like.

Categories
Web Development

Facebook’s HipHop For PHP

I mentioned the other day that Facebook was about to open source a method for speeding up PHP. Today they announced HipHop a code transformation tool that converts PHP into C++ and compiles using g++. There is apparently a server component to this strategy as well.

I’m slightly skeptical that this approach will have much more success than the other attempts in the past. This approach may make sense for Facebook, but I don’t think it will pay off for most smaller (relatively speaking) sites.

I think for most users doing something similar to the Unladen Swallow, an effort for Python which is trying to build a custom virtual machine with a JIT built on top of LLVM would be best. Perhaps even Nanojit could be a potential option.

I suspect HipHop will be a fork more than anything else. Regardless it’s a pretty cool project and some really interesting technology.

Categories
Web Development

Facebook’s New PHP “Runtime”

According to SDTimes Facebook is about to release a new open source project where it has either re-written the PHP Runtime (unlikely) or built a PHP compiler (more likely).

There is another possibility. It could be a Zend extension acting as an opcode cache (APC, XCache, etc.) and a FastCGI replacement.

It’s also possible they used Quercus as either a starting point or inspiration and it’s actually Java based, but that sounds unlikely.

Regardless, it will be interesting to see what comes of this.

Categories
Mozilla Web Development

Embedded JavaScript For Web 3.0

John Resig has an interesting blog post on embedded JavaScript. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a little while.

It would be awesome to see a PHP extension to embed SpiderMonkey into PHP. As far as I’m aware Facebook is the only one that’s taken a step in that direction with FBJS, which uses Mozilla source code. Perhaps that could be a starting point.

Considering the ubiquity of JavaScript, using SpiderMonkey, which is already available for Perl and Python, or Rhino (for Java) would make sense. It would allow for JavaScript to be for logic what XML is for data. In my mind that is nirvana for the web.

XML made our data portable. JavaScript can make our logic portable. Seems practical enough right?

For those who question security, it’s really up to the client to decide if it should parse JS, and what subset it should allow (perhaps no eval()). Having an API based on JS is really no less secure than any other language including one that’s home made. It’s advantage is that it’s used everywhere else and makes your API easier to work with.

This could be cornerstone of Web 3.0. Web 2.0 was largely about shared data and isolated small services. Web 3.0 could be about shared data and shared services.

Categories
Mozilla Open Source

Facebook Open Sources Platform

Facebook today released the code behind their application platform. What that entails:

This release includes the API infrastructure, the FQL parser, the FBML parser, and FBJS, as well as implementations of many common methods and tags. We’ve included samples and some dummy data to help you get started fast.

It’s mostly licensed under Common Public Attribution License (CPAL), with the exception of the FBML stuff, which is MPL. It’s actually Mozilla code, and seems to be based on Firefox 2.0.0.4. I wonder if they plan to upgrade to Firefox 3? Some enhancements that would presumably give would be JavaScript 1.8 support and native JSON encode/decode. Or at least the latest Firefox 2 release… but I digress.

Before releasing their API last year, Facebook bought Parakey, founded by Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt of Firefox fame. I don’t know if this code is actually derived from the unreleased Parakey, or even written by them. For all I know it could have been written by Facebook developers well before they were even acquired. Though if I had to place a bet, I’d guess this is code from Parakey. The code all looks pretty well scrubbed of anything that might give away Facebook secrets.

Categories
Around The Web Funny Google Mozilla

April Fools 2008

As usual, my list of April Fools that I saw today:

Categories
Around The Web Google Mozilla

Secrets In Websites II

This post is a follow up to the first Secrets In Websites. For those who don’t remember the first time, I point out odd, interesting, funny things in other websites’ code. Yes it takes some time to put a post like this together, that’s why it’s just about a year since the last time. Enough with the intro, read on for the code.

Continue reading “Secrets In Websites II”
Categories
Mozilla Security

Email Image Protection

Many people think that making an image out of an email is a good way to protect it from being harvested by spam bots. It’s now possible to convert it from an image to email link via a Firefox extension. Guess what, an email harvester can do this just as well. What’s a better solution against email harvesters? Don’t put any trace of an email address online, use a form. Yes you could distort the image a bit to make it more difficult, but using a CAPTCHA as an email isn’t going to make you any friends. JavaScript can also be done, but no reason why it can’t be interpreted (though that may be more difficult in some cases, since a JS engine isn’t the easiest thing to work with, and implementing anything less can easily be defeated by throwing some extra JS in there. Some discussion on the Firefox Extension implementation can also be found on Gerv’s blog where he proposed the idea.

Categories
In The News Mozilla

Facebook Acquires Parakey

According to TechCrunch Parakey was acquired by Facebook. For those who haven’t been following. Parakey was Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt’s new venture. Their priors include a certain cvs branch that spawned a certain web browser and a certain developer extension for the browser called Firebug (released through Parakey according to the footer). I’m guessing this isn’t part of a plan for a “WebOS” but to strengthen the Facebook Platform.

For the record Facebook is a pretty decent open source contributor as well as a consumer. Hopefully this means that Blake’s intention to open source most of Parakey will still hold true. Some more work on Firebug would also be awesome.

Congrats to Blake and Joe!

Categories
Google In The News

facebook.google.com?

According to Business Week the reason why Google is raising $2 Billion, may be to buy Facebook. I guess that would be the final nail in the coffin for Orkut. Could be interesting to see what Google would do with another social networking site. The first attempt didn’t seem to be very successful. Perhaps they have different plans for this one? Personally I think $2 Billion is a bit to much for the site.