NAME

Facebook::Graph::Cookbook::Recipe2 - Building a Full Web App

VERSION

version 1.0801

DESCRIPTION

A full working web app for those people who like to start hacking from a working example and make it their own.

Prerequisite Modules

You'll need to have all of the following modules installed in order to run this app (in addition to Facebook::Graph):

DateTime::Format::ICal Dancer Template Data::ICal XML::FeedPP

Assumptions

This recipe assumes that you have a Facebook (<http://www.facebook.com>) account.

You'll also have to be able to point a domain name to a server that is accessible from the Internet. DNS and server configuration are way beyond the scope of this document.

In order to edit this web app you're either going to have to know or be willing to learn Dancer. It's a good little web app server. You can find out more at <http://perldancer.org>.

RECIPE

Step 1: Set up the developer application on Facebook.

Go to <http://apps.facebook.com/developer>.

Click "Allow".

Step 2: Create your application.

Go to <http://www.facebook.com/developers/createapp.php> or click "Set Up New Application" from the developer application.

Fill in an application name. The only restriction is that it can't use a Facebook trademark or be similar to official Facebook application names.

Agree to the terms of service.

Click "Create Application".

Step 3: The Connect tab.

After creating your application, go to the "Connect" tab.

Fill in the "Connect URL" field. It should be "http://www.yourapplication.com/". It is the base URL to where you'll be deploying your application. The trailing slash is required.

Click "save".

Step 4: Note your application settings.

You either want to make note of your "Application ID" and your "Application Secret" or bookmark this page so you can come back to it. You'll need these later.

Step 5: Copy files.

If you don't already have it downloaded, download a tarball of Facebook::Graph and extract it:

 tar xfz Facebook-Graph-0.0700.tar.gz

And copy the files from "eg/recipe2" where ever you want to deploy your app. For this example we'll assume you want to deploy from "/opt/webapp".

 mkdir -p /opt/webapp
 cp -Rfp Facebook-Graph/eg/recipe2/* /opt/webapp

Step 6: Configure your app.

Before we can run the app we need to edit the config file.

 cd /opt/webapp
 vi config.yml

Specifically we need to set the "app_id" and "secret" fields with information from our Facebook application settings page. And we need to update the "postback" with the domain pointing to our server.

Step 7: Start it.

To start the app just type the following command:

 cd /opt/webapp
 perl app.pl

Step 8: Play with it.

Go use the web app. See what it does. Point your browser to:

 http://www.yourapplication.com/

Step 9: Start tinkering.

Now that you know you have a working app, start tinkering. Make it do what you want it to do.