Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you. Use Facebook to…  Keep up with friends and family  Share photos and videos  Control privacy online  Reconnect with old classmates  Discuss interests and hobbies  Plan parties and other events

To write FB apps using java, you’ll be using Enterprise Edition (J2EE). The way FB works requires you to provide a webserver for your app. Whilst its true that java can run in the web browser, that’s a completely different way of using java - for this, you’re going to have to find a server, and install J2EE (it’s the same as standard java, just has lots of extra libraries, only a few of which you’ll need to use). We can also write FB apps by using PHP,.Net and other Technologies.

1. Create a Facebook account if you don’t have one, and login 2. Add the “Developer” app to your account 3. Go to your Home page on FB 4. Click on the Developer app in the sidebar to go to the main centre for all your Developer activity 5. Make a new application, and fill in the form it presents you with (make sure you do at least): App name  App name  Call back URL  Canvas page  iFrame (not FBML)  Post-add URL 6. Save the api-key and the session-key that it now displays for the newly-created app - you’ll need them to do any coding

Facebook apps can be implemented one of two ways, iframes, or FBML. iFrame Standard part of HTML, embeds one webpage inside another You can view pages through a normal web- browser to test them Every Facebook page view goes via your webserver, so you can debug problems Requires you to provide your own webserver FBML Proprietary Facebook programming language, very similar to HTML You cannot view anything except by running it live on Facebook All requests are internal on the Facebook servers, you cannot find ANY information if something goes wrong Can run without an external webserver

There are two “modes” in which you can create a webpage to display as part of your app:  Default  Authenticated In the default mode, i.e. if you do nothing special, you have NO ACCESS to any of Facebook’s data. You cannot find out ANYTHING about the Facebook user - you can’t find their name, you can’t find their friends, you can’t post items on their Wall, nothing. In the authenticated mode, you have full access to: read all the data of the currently logged-in user most of the data of all OTHER users of your app (people who have “added” your app to their Facebook account) send messages, post news items, etc, from the logged- in user (but they have to OK this manually)

Data updated into the local database