On the JSLabs blog today, there's a new tutorial showing how you (yes you) can use the Facebook Developer's API to pull information from their systems.
The facebook API allows you to access profiles, friends, photos, and events. To access the API from an outside server, you need to go through the following steps:
- login to your Facebook Account
- get an account key
- Get the client library
- The php 5 library can be found here
He uses the PHP library to make the connection - a simple call to the API (complete with API key, the location of the interface, a secret key, and a session key to provide a unique identifier. The request made logs a user in (much have a valid Facebook account) and grabs: the count of the messages waiting, the number of posts to your wall, and a list of available photo albums.
It seems some people are having trouble with the Facebook Data Store API. I have abstracted its behaviour into several classes. Although incomplete, the WMSFacebookDataStore API allows rudimentary CRUD access to Facebook's database.
http://www.davidjarvis.ca/facebook/
http://www.davidjarvis.ca/facebook/docs/
Data Store classes:
WMSFacebookDataStore
WMSFacebookDataStoreAssociation
WMSFacebookDataStoreAssociationLink
WMSFacebookDataStoreObject
WMSFacebookDataStoreProperty
WMSFacebookDataStoreRow
Core classes:
WMSFacebook
WMSFacebookApplication
WMSFacebookFriend (stub)
WMSFacebookMessage (stub)
WMSFacebookObject
WMSFacebookProfile (stub)
WMSFacebookUser
At the very least it shows how to use Facebook's Data Store API.