Developing for Facebook

Facebook was built with open source software and the Facebook Platform is designed in the same spirit.

The platform has a proprietary API, a Facebook Query Language (FQL) and a Facebook Markup Language. There’s no charge to use the tools.

The API uses a representational state transfer (REST)-based Web services interface; i.e. Facebook method calls are made over the Internet by sending HTTP GET or POST requests to REST server. With the API, one can add social context to an application by utilizing profile, friend, photo and event data. There are also plans to introduce support for simple object access protocol (SOAP) Web services in the future.

FQL employs a SQL-style interface for tapping Facebook data.; enabling developers to obtain more granular information about a set of items, instead of all of it, and gaining the ability to issue more detailed requests, which can result in fewer queries overall.

Facebook Markup Language is a subset of HTML that developers use to integrate their applications into the overall user experience, tapping points such as newsfeeds, profiles and other areas.

The company has set up a support and resource site at http://developers.facebook.com. It contains a wiki, documentation and official client libraries for PHP and Java. There are also a number of “unofficial” libraries on the site, including ones for ActionScript, .NET, Python, Ruby, Perl, ColdFusion, VB.NET and others.

There are millions of users at Facebook; surely there must be a way of making money here.