I’ve been doing a bit of FBML lately, and I’ve been impressed with the quality of tools available for that environment. I think FBML is often underused and underappreciated. With FBJS and the Ajax loaders, you can port pretty much all of your rails functionality over to FBML, and get the benefit of ‘native-feeling’ pages and fast load times (without the weird iframe-flash that most facebook apps have). I also find the pain of getting things to work on FBML is absolutely outweighed by the fbml tags facebook provides for searching friends, inviting users or showing facebook-ish dialogs.

760.css

This is a great css framework for doing block-based layout (as made famous by blueprint.css and 960.css). It lets you create nicely structured pages with simple tags like <div class=”grid_5″></div>. It’s nice to see this framework working under FBML.

FBJquery

I’m a longtime jquery fan, and was very impressed to find this port of jquery to fbjs. It does have some bugs (next, prev and parents don’t work as they should) and some peculiarities (css doesn’t accept hashes for example) but is a great start for your facebook development. I’ve been doing some work on fbjquery, fixing various bugs and making it code-compatible with jquery-1.3.2, I’ll put my fixes up on github when they’re ready for release.

The biggest problem I’ve had so far with Facebook is that you can’t readily use the render :update functionality of rails to do dynamic page updates, since you can’t eval() the response from an ajax request.

I’ve worked around that by manually parsing and executing the returned javascript, this lets me use the normal rails code, but have it converted into something that can be executed by FBJS. It does feel a little bit like hacks on top of hacks, but my goal is to have a complete environment for working inside FBML, not a cut-down version that feels “hamstrung” compared to normal HTML.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.