Facebook apps

[Pedro Figueiredo]

On 22 May 2010, at 08:20, Dave Hodgkinson wrote:

> 
> On 22 May 2010, at 05:53, Zbigniew Lukasiak wrote:
> 
>> Hi there,
>> 
>> It seems that there is a huge demand for Facebook applications.  At
>> least this is what my colleague is trying to convince me about, but
>> since I have already been approached by a guy interested in this and I
>> have already written one app - I have seen all the craze of a gold
>> rush in the Facebook programming forums, it is not that hard to do :)
>> Are there any Perl programmers freelancing in this market?  How do you
>> host your apps?  It is mostly about simple one-page thingies - so the
>> up-front cost of setting up your own virtual machine to run your own
>> apache with mod_perl is a bit intimidating.
> 
> Load up a decent VM on Amazon. Should all be out of the box. Or any
> other cloud provider.

Nah, at least for starters it's much more expensive than getting a VPS on Bytemark or Slicehost, or even a real server at Flosoft (to mention those I know). When you're happy with what you have and want to grow/get real, move to AWS.

> 
> Got a CPAN module that distils the necessary code?

http://search.cpan.org/dist/WWW-Facebook-API/

App Engine might also be an option - although I don't know how it'll behave when your app reaches a few million users. Stay away from the commonly used Java SDK, it's bloated and it doesn't do what it says on the tin and it's unnecessarily complicated. It's simple enough to write your own, just a couple of methods to build and sign the requests plus whatever API calls you require - WWW::Facebook::API takes exactly this approach.

Cheers,

Pedro