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Facebook Graph API Development with Flash

Chapter 1. Introduction

Ready to start learning how to develop Flash Facebook applications? You will be in a few pages.

In this chapter, we will:

Learn what the big deal is about Facebook, and why you should be interested in developing an application for it
Get you set up with a web host, which you'll need for developing any online Facebook application
Establish how much AS3 you need to know already, and what to do if you don't
Take a quick look at the project that you'll be building throughout most of this book
Find out how to deal with the debugging complications that arise when developing a "browser-only" application like this

So let's get on with it...

What's so great about Facebook?

Seems like everyone's on Facebook these days—people are on it to socialize; businesses are on it to try to attract those people's attention. But the same is true for other older social networks such as LinkedIn, Friendster, and MySpace. Facebook's reach goes far beyond these; my small town's high street car park proudly displays a "Like Us On Facebook" sign.

More and more Flash games and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are allowing users to log in using their Facebook account—it's a safe assumption that most users will have one. Companies are asking freelancers for deeper Facebook integration in their projects. It's practically a buzzword.

But why the big fuss?

It's popular

Facebook benefits from the snowball effect: it's big, so it gets bigger.
People sign up because most of their friends are already on it, which is generally not the case for, say, Twitter. Businesses sign up because they can reach so many people. It's a virtuous circle.
There's a low barrier to entry, too; it's not just for techies, or even people who are "pretty good with computers;" even old people and luddites use Facebook. In February 2010, the technology blog ReadWriteWeb published an article called "Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login," about Facebook's attempts to become the de facto login system throughout the Web. Within minutes, the comments filled up with posts from confused Facebook users:
(Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login.php.)
- Evidently, the ReadWriteWeb article had temporarily become the top search result for Facebook Login, leading hundreds of Facebook users, equating Google or Bing with the Internet, to believe that this blog post was actually a redesigned Facebook.com. The comment form, fittingly, had a Sign in with Facebook button that could be used instead of manually typing in a name and e-mail address to sign a comment—and of course, the Facebook users misinterpreted this as the new Log in button.
- And yet… all of those people manage to use Facebook, keenly enough to throw a fit when it apparently became impossible to use. It's not just a site for geeks and students; it has serious mass market appeal.
Even "The Social Network"—a movie based on the creation of Facebook—held this level of appeal: it opened at #1 and remained there for its second weekend.

Numbers

According to Facebook's statistics page (http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics), over 500 million people log in to Facebook in any given month (as of November 2010). For perspective, the population of the entire world is just under 7,000 million.
Twitter is estimated to have 95 million monthly active users (according to the eMarketer.com September 2010 report), as is MySpace. FarmVille, the biggest game based on the Facebook platform, has over 50 million: more than half the population of either competing social network.
FarmVille has been reported to be hugely profitable, with some outsider reports claiming that its parent company, Zynga, has generated twice as much profit as Facebook itself (though take this with a grain of salt). Now, of course, not every Facebook game or application can be that successful, and FarmVille does benefit from the same snowball effect as Facebook itself, making it hard to compete with—but that almost doesn't matter; these numbers validate Facebook as a platform on which a money-making business can be built.

It's everywhere

As the aforementioned ReadWriteWeb article explained, Facebook has become a standard login across many websites. Why add yet another username/password combination to your browser's list (or your memory) if you can replace them all with one Facebook login?

This isn't restricted to posting blog comments. UK TV broadcaster, Channel 4, allows viewers to access their entire TV lineup on demand, with no need to sign up for a specific Channel 4 account:

Again, Facebook benefits from that snowball effect: as more sites enable a Facebook login, it becomes more of a standard, and yet more sites decide to add a Facebook login in order to keep up with everyone else.

Besides login capabilities, many sites also allow users to share their content via Facebook. Another UK TV broadcaster, the BBC, lets users post links for their recommended TV programs straight to Facebook:

Blogs—or, indeed, many websites with articles—allow readers to Like a post, publishing this fact on Facebook and on the site itself:

So half a billion people use the Facebook website every month, and at the same time, Facebook spreads further and further across the Internet—and even beyond. "Facebook Messages" stores user's entire conversational histories, across e-mail, SMS, chat, and Facebook itself; "Facebook Places" lets users check into a physical location, letting friends know that they're there.

No other network has this reach.

It's interesting to develop for

With all this expansion, it's difficult for a developer to keep up with the Facebook platform. And sometimes there are bugs, and undocumented areas, and periods of downtime, all of which can make development harder still.

But the underlying system—the Graph API, introduced in April 2010—is fascinating. The previous API had become bloated and cumbersome over its four years; the Graph API feels well-designed with plenty of room for expansion.

This book mainly focuses on the Graph API, as it is the foundation of modern Facebook development. You'll be introduced to it properly in Chapter 2, Welcome to the Graph.

Have a go hero – get on Facebook

If you're not on Facebook already, sign up now (for free) at http://facebook.com. You'll need an account in order to develop applications that use it. Spend some time getting used to it:

Set up a personal profile.
Post messages to your friends on their Walls.
See what all the FarmVille fuss is about at http://apps.facebook.com/onthefarm.
Check in to a location using Facebook Places.
Log in to some blogs using your Facebook account.
Share some YouTube videos on your own Wall from the YouTube website.
"Like" something.
Go native!

Web hosts

If you've already got a publicly accessible web server or are signed up to a web host to which you can upload SWFs and HTML pages via FTP, skip to the How much AS3 knowledge is required? section.

What's a web host?

I'll assume that you roughly know how the Internet works: when you type a URL into a web browser on your computer and hit Go, it retrieves all the pages and images it needs from another computer, the web server, and displays them. The exact methods it uses to find the web server and the protocols for how the information gets back to your computer aren't relevant here.

You could go out and buy a computer, install some server software, and hook it up to your Internet connection, and you'd have a functional web server. But you'd have to maintain it and keep it secure, and your ISP probably wouldn't be very happy about you sending all those pages and images to other people's browsers. A better option is to pay another company to take care of all of that for you—a web host.

Why do you need one?

In order to build an online SWF-based application or game that allows users to log in with their Facebook account (with the SWF being able to access their profile, list of friends, Wall, and so on), you will require control over a web page.
Technically, you could probably come up with some hack that would allow you to get around this—perhaps by hosting everything on Google sites and MegaSWF—but in the long run it's not going to be worth it. Splash out on a web host for the sake of learning; you will definitely need access to one if you do professional Facebook application development in the future.

How do you choose one?

There are a huge number of web hosts to choose from, and an even bigger number of configurable options between them. How much disk space do you need? How much bandwidth per month? How much processing power? Some hosts will give you a server all to yourself, while others will put your files on the same computer as other customers. And of course, you have to wonder how good the customer service is and how reliable the company is at keeping their servers online. Throw in a few terms such as "cloud hosting" and it's enough to make your head spin.
All you need is a host that allows you to upload HTML files and SWFs; this book also assumes that you'll be able to use FTP to transfer files from your computer to the host, though this isn't strictly necessary.
Want to just get started without wasting time comparing hosts? Go with Media Temple. The code in this book was all tested using a Media Temple Grid Service account, available at http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/gs/. It provides much more than what you'll need for completing the projects in this book, granted, and at $20/month. It's not the cheapest option available, but the extra service and features will definitely come in handy as you build your own Facebook applications and games.

Useful software

You'll need an HTML editor for editing web pages. FlashDevelop and Flash Builder both do good jobs at this; otherwise, try:

Notepad++ for Windows (free): http://notepad-plus-plus.org/
Text Mate for Mac: http://macromates.com/
Komodo Edit for Mac and Windows (free): http://www.activestate.com/komodo-edit

And in order to transfer your files from your computer to your web host, you'll probably need an FTP client. Check out FileZilla (it's free and available for both Windows and Mac) at http://filezilla-project.org/. Documentation for this is available at http://wiki.filezilla-project.org/Documentation, and your web host will almost certainly provide instructions on connecting to it via FTP (Media Temple's instructions can be found at http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/131/Using+FTP+and+SFTP)

What about domain names?

Web hosts will generally assign you a very generic address, such as http://michaeljw.awesomewebhost2000.com/ or http://sites.awesomewebhost2000.com/michaeljw. If you want to have a more condensed personal address such as http://michaeljw.com/, you'll need to pay for it. This is called a domain name—in this specific example, michaeljw.com is the domain name.

Media Temple allows you to buy a domain name for $5/year at the point where you sign up to their web hosting package. If you go with another host, you may need to buy a domain name elsewhere; for this, you can use http://www.moniker.com/.

You don't need to own a domain name to use this book, though. The generic addresses that your web host assigns you will be fine. Throughout the book, it'll be assumed that your website address (either generic or domain name) is http://host.com/.

Have a go hero – get a web host, upload to it, test

Pick a web host, get your credit card out, and sign up for one of their packages.

Create a new directory called /test/ in the public path of your web host.
Create a new plain text file on your hard drive called index.html. (It's a good idea to create a new folder on your computer to store all your work, too.) Open this file in your HTML editor.

Copy the HTML below into the file:

<html>
  <head>
  <title>Test</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h2>Hello!</h2>
  </body>
</html>

Hopefully, you know enough HTML to understand that this just writes Hello! in big letters.
Transfer index.html to the /text/ directory on your host. Again, you'll probably need to use an FTP client for this.
Open a web browser and type http://host.com/test/index.html into the URL bar. Of course, you should replace http://host.com/ with the path to your public directory, as given to you by your web host. You should see Hello! appear in a glorious default font:
If not, check the documentation and support for your host.

The source code

At the start of Chapter 2, Welcome to the Graph, you'll be given a Flash project that's just an empty user interface—it'll be up to you to build the backend using the lessons you learn from Chapters 2 through 6.

This project is called Visualizer, and contains the class structure and all the UI for an application that can be used to represent all of the information stored on Facebook. You'll go far beyond simply allowing people to log in to the application and grabbing their username; there is so much more that can be achieved with AS3 and the Graph API, and you'll learn about all of it.

Although the project is complex, the classes have been arranged in such a way that you need to modify only a small number of them, and these have little or no code in them to begin with. This means that you don't have to dive into mountains of code that you didn't write! You can focus entirely on learning about the Facebook side of Flash development.

Each of the Chapters from 2 to 6 has two associated ZIP files: one for the start of the project at the start of the chapter, and one for the end. This means you could skip through those chapters in any order, but you'll find it must easier to learn if you go through them in sequence. All project files are available in forms that are compatible with Flash CS3 and above, Flash Builder, and FlashDevelop—and if you use a different Flash editor, you should find it easy to convert the project.

When you first compile the project, it'll look like this:

Nothing much to see. But before long, you'll have added features so that it can be used to explore Facebook, rendering different Pages and Photos:

By the end of Chapter 6, you'll be happily adding code to search for users by name, exploring their personal profiles, and posting images and links to their Wall:

…plus plenty more besides!

Powered by…

In September 2010, Adobe released an official Adobe ActionScript 3 SDK for the Facebook Platform Graph API, which will remain fully supported by Adobe and Facebook. Read more about it at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/facebook.html. This book will teach you how to use this SDK, as it is a standard technology.

However, the main aim of this book is to teach you the underlying concepts of Facebook Flash development; once you understand these, the actual code and the SDK used don't matter. For this reason, this book will also teach you how to program every sort of Facebook interaction you might need from scratch. The code will be all yours, and you'll understand every line, with no abstraction in the way.

Besides the Adobe AS3 SDK for Facebook Platform, two other code libraries are used heavily:

MinimalComps: Keith Peters' excellent, lightweight user interface components, available at http://www.minimalcomps.com/ under an MIT license.
as3corelib: A collection of classes and utilities for working with AS3, including classes for JSON serialization, available at https://github.com/mikechambers/as3corelib under a BSD license.

Debugging

From Chapter 3 onwards your SWF will need to be run from your server, through a web browser, in order to work. (Find out why in that chapter.) This makes debugging tricky—there's no Output panel in the browser, so trace statements aren't automatically visible.

The Visualizer contains a dialog feature which you can use to work around this. It can be created from any class that is in the display list. To do so, first import the DialogEvent class:

import events.DialogEvent;

Then, dispatch a DialogEvent of type DIALOG with an argument containing the text you wish to see output:

dispatchEvent(new DialogEvent(DialogEvent.DIALOG, "Example"));

It will look like this:

Of course, that's useful only for the Visualizer project. What can you do when you build your own?

There are a few tools that will help:

De MonsterDebugger: Excellent tool for general AS3 debugging: http://demonsterdebugger.com/.
Flash Tracer for Firebug: This Firefox tool lets you see trace statements from any SWF, as long as you have the debug version of Flash Player installed in your browser: http://blog.sephiroth.it/firefox-extensions/flash-tracer-for-firebug/.
Vizzy Flash Tracer: Similar to Flash Tracer for Firebug, but also works for Internet Explorer and Chrome: http://code.google.com/p/flash-tracer/.
SOS max: Creates a socket server on your computer to which an AS3 project can send data; this data will then be logged and can then be viewed: http://www.sos.powerflasher.com/.

In Chapter 3, you'll learn how to run a JavaScript function in your web page from the AS3 in your SWF. One JavaScript function, alert(), creates a little window containing any String passed to it, like so:

This is a quick and simple way to display one-off messages without using trace.

Watch out for caching

When you run a SWF using Flash Player on your desktop, it loads and runs the SWF. Well, of course, why wouldn't it?

When you run a SWF in a browser, this isn't always the case, though. Sometimes, browsers cache SWFs, meaning that they save a copy locally and then load that copy—rather than the online version—the next time you request it. In normal browsing, this is a great idea—it saves bandwidth and reduces loading times. You can lose huge amounts of time trying to figure out why your new code isn't working, only to finally realize that the new code isn't being run at all because you were seeing only a cached copy of your SWF.

Different browsers require different solutions. It's usually possible to disable caching for one browsing session, and it's always possible to delete some or all of the cache.

In Google Chrome, you can do this by clicking on [Spanner] | Tools | Clear Browsing Data…, selecting Empty the cache, and choosing an appropriate time period:

You should easily be able to find the equivalent option for your browser by searching Google for «browser name» delete cache.

Key benefits

Build your own interactive applications and games that integrate with Facebook

Add social features to your AS3 projects without having to build a new social network from scratch

Learn how to retrieve information from Facebook's database

A hands-on guide with step-by-step instructions and clear explanation that encourages experimentation and play

Description

The Facebook platform provides you with an ideal solution for building rich, social experiences on the web to develop an effective user experience application. Combined with Flash which effectively enables social interactions, you can create a fully functional application on Facebook. If you've been waiting to get started with your own applications and games on Facebook, with this book you don't have to wait any longer.This book takes you through everything you need to know to integrate your AS3 apps and games with Facebook accompanied by illustrative screenshots and short quizzes.It presents you with in depth coverage of the key underlying concepts such as creating a basic application that runs inside Facebook and exploring the Graph API which greatly simplifies how developers can retrieve data. This book also covers topics on security, permissions and authentication features on Facebook.This beginner's guide starts off by teaching you about retrieving simple public data and then rapidly working your way up to authenticating users, building powerful searches across the entire database, and uploading photos and other content. Throughout the book, you'll learn by building two fundamental components: an RIA Facebook interface and an AS3 SDK that you can drop into any project to add Facebook integration. This easy-to-understand guide has everything written as AS3-only projects with publicly available components, so you can follow along whether you use Flash Pro, Flex, or MXMLC ‚Äì as long as you know AS3! This hands-on tutorial will present you with a whole new perspective of the three core aspects of Facebook ‚Äì searching, retrieving, and updating the data .This practical book focuses on how to set up an application on Facebook and how to deal with different contexts like AIR.By the end of this book, you will be confident enough to set up your own application and create social interactions for users to share on Facebook.

Who is this book for?

If you are an AS3 developer who wants to create applications and games that integrate with Facebook ‚Äì either on the Facebook website itself or off it, then this book is for you. Even if you have no previous experience with Facebook, databases, or server-side programming , you can count on this book.

What you will learn

Make your AS3 projects more social and personalise them for your users by adding Facebook integration

Grab information directly from Facebook into your applications by using Facebook s Graph API

Securely authenticate your users with OAuth 2.0 to log them into Facebook

Access information about your users and their friends directly from Facebook ‚Äì no need to make them type it all in again

Upload photographs, add wall posts, and create events through AS3

Search on Facebook s databases with the powerful Facebook Query Language

Build an AS3 Facebook SDK that you can drop into any AS3 project to add Facebook integration

Easily access both public and private Facebook data from the surface of a graph

Learn with exercises and fun examples illustrated with diagrams and screenshots

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Juwal Bose Jan 27, 2011

If you are serious about FB (facebook) development, then i assure you this book is going to benefit you, so go ahead and buy it now. You can read the review later ;)So if any of you have tried FB development with flash, or with out flash for that matter, would definitely know that it is a PIA. The API keeps on changing every fortnight or so and even as i write this it had changed 2 days back, so you should hurry and get uptodate to give yourselves the edge thereby keeping ahead of all others. I am writing this review after half way through the book, realizing that I would end up spending a lot of time learning new things and testing new things related to the book. So i decided to spread the news right away as it would take time for me to finish it in a real sense.Let me list down the points that i noticed* Associated Codes are given in multiple formats, the Flash IDE, Flash Builder and Fashdevelop. This helps all kinds of users and we can easily see that even if your development environment is different, you can adapt the right one from any of these for your purposes.* Starts simple, gives you the code base for 'Visualiser' app which you can go through and understand how graph data is parsed and also as an added benefit you get to learn implementing Minimal comps. :)* FQL - get started with FB query Language, a very strong weapon in your FB development arsenal. If you have never used it, you will get to know what you were missing.* AIR deployment with StageWebView, which is the latest update with new flashplayer feature.* Start from scratch to deploy your app onto FB, either online or on desktop.* You may end up amazed by how easily we can poll graph data directly using the browser. Neat hacks and tips which can help you really understand how graph, connections etc work.* Searching for relevant data in the FB ocean.* Easily decode the json data returned by the graph using the AS3CoreLibSo this makes us realize that it is not for AS3 newbies, but you need to be good enough with AS3 to get started right away. Most of the support code of the visualizer app is not explained as it is out of context of the book, so you would need AS3 power to understand all those. You will find real solid OOP usage and implementation with examples which can really help out the developer in you even if you are not much interested in FB development. One thing i had noticed is that Michael could have used external Debuggers like Arthropod to show log data instead of a custom dialog event, but then we could easily make that change.So in the end, when it comes to FB you need to start early and proceed as fast as possible as social media is fast changing. FB is at the forefront of the revolution and we cant blame them for changing APIs so rapidly. This book surely helps you get started right away and get into the thick of things with the latest graph API and FB AS3 SDK. Even if you don't want to use the AS3 SDK (as updates for this is usually late when FB updates APIs) you can extend the native parsing information used in the earlier stages of the book to write your own classes for accessing FB data.So rush to download the book and get those source files and start exploring the vast FB ocean. Who knows what you may end up creating, but dont thank me, thank Michael.

Amazon Verified review

Rasmus Wriedt Larsen Feb 25, 2011

I've been so lucky to get a free copy of this book for review, and I must say: If you want to get into Facebook development, I would recommend this book to you!*** Overview ***You might be thinking: "Isn't this book only for Flash developers?" - Nope, it's also for everyone else who wants to learn how the Facebook Graph API works. It even has a chapter on the more advanced FQL (Facebook Query Language). Even if you have developed Flash applications for Facebook before, I'm sure you can find a lot of good tips in this book!It's very easy to follow, and include all the basic information you need to know. For each chapter, it goes though the general theory of the API (with examples), and then straight into how to actually use it.I would say this is a complete book for creating a Facebook application, with one little exception:Deployment - at least I experienced some trouble when I wanted to deploy my test application, but even though I had some trouble with it, I wouldn't say it has an impact on the overall quality of the book - it's still superb! (You can read my solution here: [...]*** Code ***It features code for FlashDevelop, the Flash IDE and Flash Builder, so no matter what you're using to code, you should be able to follow this book. It even has two folders for each chapter with code, one you can start out from, and one with the end result.This book is not about how to display the information you receive from Facebook. This is all handled by an UI the author supplies in the downloadable files. This is about how to get data from Facebook.The book uses two different methods for integrating with the Graph API, the official Adobe SDK, and a version the reader builds them self.*** Content of Book ***The book goes though getting basic information about anyone from Facebook, then getting authenticated so you can access information about the current user, to being able to get almost all the information Facebook has about the current user (if he allows it).Then it goes on to show how to add data entires to Facebook (posts, photos, albums, events, RSPSs, notes, likes, comments & checkins), and the few things you can delete from an application.It has a dedicated chapter on FQL (Facebook Query Language), which is a more advanced way of obtaining information from Facebook, that has some other possibilities - but also limitations.It ends off with a chapter with some very different information, how to deploy, edit and adjust your application on Facebook, how to integrate with AIR/Android, the Mochi Social Platform (for deploying on game portals) and other cool things!So if you're want to get into Facebook development, I would buy this book!

Devon O Wolfgang Jan 24, 2011

I am a Flash Platform developer who has created more FB applications than I care to recall. And I can honestly say that not once have I enjoyed it. 99 times out 100, the problems I have with Facebook applications stem from Facebook itself. It seems the API and terms of service change on a weekly (sometimes daily) basis. The documentation is horrendous and filled with code examples that simply don't work. The developer forums are filled with perfectly valid questions from frustrated devs that go ignored by FB administrators for days, weeks or just indefinitely. And the bug tracker at times seems overflowing with bugs marked as resolved which still regularly occur. And rather than hammer out all the problems with core functionality, Facebook spends its time trying out then removing new features such as the ability for app developers to acquire users addresses and phone numbers.But for all its problems, Facebook applications aren't, by default, a bad thing. And when Michael James Williams offered me the opportunity to check out a copy of his new book "Facebook Graph API Development with Flash", I jumped at the chance. Rightfully so, it seems. It turns out this book is a tremendous wealth of information. Whether you're just getting started or you've got a few hundred notches in your Facebook app belt, you're bound to find something useful in this book.One of the first really nice things you'll notice about this book is that it's development environment agnostic, at least as much as a book can be expected to be. When you download the related support files you'll find you get all the sample code laid out for the Flash Professional IDE, as a Flashbuilder project, or, my personal favorite, as a Flashdevelop project. So, regardless of your usual Flash workflow, you're bound to find some working examples that fit your style.The book starts off assuming you know a decent amount of Actionscript 3 coding, but nothing about Facebook development. You'll begin right off by making Facebook Graph API calls and examining the data and structures returned. You'll see how to easily convert the returned JSON objects into useable Actionscript objects (using classes from Adobe's as3corelib library openly available on github). And by the end of Chapter 2 you're basically already building a Flash powered Facebook application - easy peasy.The demo application that you build as you follow the book, while not exactly an exciting application in its own right, does a fantastic job of not only showing how API calls are made and returned but at visually demonstrating the various connections between Facebook objects - and connections are really what the shiny new Facebook Graph API is all about. Along the way, you'll not only learn how to write AS3 that integrates with Facebook from scratch but also how to use the 'official' Adobe/Facebook SDK. And the pop quizzes at the end of each chapter help get you thinking about the info you just learned as well as help that info `sink in' (though, I have to say, I wish the answers to the quizzes would have been included at the end of the chapter. I read the book on a Sony eReader and flipping to the end to see if I had the answers right or not was not really an option).For me personally, though, where this book really shines is in its introduction to FQL. Out of all the FB apps that I have built, I have never actually used FQL and can't even say why other than I never bothered to learn it. Now though, I can see how previous apps I have worked on would have seriously benefitted from it. In fact, I am actually looking forward to my next FB app, just so I can give FQL a whirl. If, like me, you have experience building Facebook apps with Flash, but have never bothered to learn FQL, this section of the book alone is worth the price of admission.Another section of the book that came as quite a pleasant surprise was a quick look at how to integrate Facebook functionality into an AIR for Android application using the StageWebView. This is very valuable and timely information I look forward to putting to good use.For as good as the book is, though, it isn't immune to all the problems with Facebook I mentioned previously. There are a few notable places where Michael provides some code examples then basically says, "This should work, but it doesn't. Maybe the folks at Facebook will fix this soon. Or maybe not". For example, just last week I was asked to integrate a Flash Facebook app into a tab of a fan page. After reading all the Facebook documentation and trying numerous things, I couldn't figure it out and settled for putting a static jpg image in the fan page tab that linked to the application page. So, needless to say, when I saw the chapter heading "Adding an Application to a Page Tab" mentioned in the table of contents, I was pretty excited. When I finally got to that section in chapter 8 though (I don't like to skip around in books, I read it straight through), I was more than a little perturbed to find this: "...it doesn't [work] at time of writing. Currently, tabs require FBML, rather than IFrames. But by the time you read this - and as already mentioned above - tabs will not accept FBML and will require IFrames. The documentation explaining how to incorporate IFrames into tabs does not exist yet, and it can't be tested, so unfortunately this book cannot explain how to do it. Sorry!" Well, at least that made me feel a little bit better about not being able to figure it out myself, but it doesn't really bolster my opinion of Facebook development in general.All things considered though, if you do any Flash / Facebook integration, I definitely recommend giving "Facebook Graph API Development with Flash" a read. You will certainly find something there that will make your life a lot easier. As the book itself indicates, it doesn't just simply throw a collection of code snippets at you, but gives an insight to the structure and organization of Facebook data, making it a little less stressful to deal with the inevitable changes you are bound to run across when developing for the FB platform.

Shecky Bonus Nov 20, 2013

The book is written as a soup-to-nuts project, rather than a cookbook. Since a lot of the pieces are out-of-date (FB constantly changes APIs), the whole thing is a flop.

Facebook Graph API Development with Flash: Build social Flash applications fully integrated with the Facebook Graph API

What do you get with Print?

Facebook Graph API Development with Flash

Chapter 1. Introduction

What's so great about Facebook?

It's popular

Numbers

It's everywhere

It's interesting to develop for

Have a go hero – get on Facebook

Web hosts

What's a web host?

Why do you need one?

How do you choose one?

Useful software

What about domain names?

Have a go hero – get a web host, upload to it, test

How much AS3 knowledge is required?

The source code

Powered by…

Debugging

Watch out for caching

A final note…

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Facebook Graph API Development with Flash: Build social Flash applications fully integrated with the Facebook Graph API

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