Facebook applications: they're the Pylons community's dirty little secret. Nobody wants to admit it, but we're all either building them or thinking about building them. Come on, fess up. The sooner we get this out in the open, the sooner we make some real progress.
I, for one, would be very happy to see us come out of the Facebook closet with a vengeance and build a totally rockin' support package for getting FB apps up and running quickly. Yes, the Facebook API is a moving target. Yes, the Facebook developers make more bugs than they fix. Yes, there are thousand technical arguments against supporting Facebook as a application platform at the moment. (Please, let's not go there. Maybe in another thread, alright?) But there's one very big, naysayer-defeating reason in favor of bringing an "fbpylons" package to life: to save ourselves time. But seriously, if anyone is interested in collaborating, here's my very modest (and poorly documented) start: http://github.com/brianthelion/fbpylons. My goal was to build a drop-in, "It Just Works!" (tm), Swiss-army- knife of a support package for, well, building Facebook apps using Pylons. Requirements: 1) Handle the spectrum of Facebook application types (Connect, Connect/ XFBML, Canvas/FBML, Canvas/iframe, etc.) 2) Minimize the number of insertion points. (Ideally, drop the code in proj/lib, import it into you're controller's namespace, and go to work as if you were building a standard Pylons app.) 3) Overload the standard set of "helper" functions to do Facebook- specific things. 4) Support both the OAuth/Graph and RESTful APIs and various, weird, "migration" states. At this point in my effort, though, certain questions about the overall design of fbpylons and its approach to solving the problems at hand are starting to surface. Hence, my interest in soliciting feedback and help from others who have also been working on Facebook apps for a while. I hope this thread will serve as a point of technical discussion, and well as a launching pad for the Facebook/ Pylons uber-package of our dreams. Now who's with me?! ~br -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pylons-discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pylons-discuss?hl=en.
