Decaflon

Can you post some information on creating FB apps with ruby on rails. i would be very intrested. Thanks. O yea whats the name of the app.

I've been playing around with F8, mostly as research and prove-of-concept stuff for work - nothing public.. yet. As much as I love Ruby, it's much simpler to get really simple things going with PHP. Unless you're building anything that could use an ActiveRecord ;)

I'd really like to heard your opinion on scaling RoR based Facebook apps. Since all the FBML is cached and FQL queries are run against Facebook's database, it's really a completely different ballgame. FBML comes with IF-logic tags and other nifty features. If you can avoid needing to use your own database, you could really push out a multi-million user app from your cellphone ;) So it's the database that takes the huge hit -- how's the ActiveRecord tradeoff? (performance vs. development as usual I guess?)

I am looking for a Facebook application that will allow me to say exactly which applications I am interested in, and suppress all other applications on my own profile, my home-page, my notifications, and anybody's profile I happen to visit.

Maybe I am just a grumpy old sod, but I just don't want to be bothered by invitations to become a zombie, or invited to find out what my stripper name is.

There's a really clean, nice facebook app, http://www.coursevote.com, that's written in rails on mtr that I've reluctantly taken up possibly maintaining. I'm pretty new to rails and completely fresh to facebook, and there are challenges posed in third party hosted rails development against facebook api. I just thought I'd share a common issue or two that you might run in to:
- the api changes.. without warning
- sometimes you get your app, sometimes you get a completely helpless message about the makers of Facebook and [this app] are having issues.. reload, and it's fine again
- if working with production config, you'll have to stop/start the app a lot during development.. I think there is some other caching happening even in development.

I'm having a tough time stop/starting thru mtr, but it may be localized to just this app. cheers.

bcswebstudio -

Thanks for sharing your experience. I've gone through the whole process of building out, scrapping, and rebuilding my Facebook app on Rails now. I can't imagine doing development on MT. I would have far exceeded the limitations of even their largest "rails container" after a week. Maybe I'm still a poor rails hacker, but Rails just runs too slow with 1 mongrel.

I don't have too many hooks into the Facebook API, so I haven't been adversely affected by changes.

I'm running an iframe app, so my users don't get Facebook's worthless message.

I have two Rails apps running on MT, and I'm glad I'm done development, because restarting your Rails container *is* a pain.

Good luck with Coursevote! If you're looking for Rails/Facebook help, you can always get help in the #facebook IRC channel. The people who hang out there are all really helpful.

We haven't made one yet, but I would like to in the future just to see how the process goes. Don't really have a fascination with the FB platform, but seeing how it works and how we can interact with APIs would be very interesting.

Scrivs: If you ever want to get into making an app, let me know. I've made quite a few (all with PHP & MySQL).