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Welcome to Design Madison Creations. I offer web design and programming for business and individuals in the Greater St. Louis area, as well as the Midwest. Feel free to contact me regarding my services.

First Facebook Application Developed for Angie Fox

My client and good friend, Angie Fox, wanted a Facebook application for her “Are you part Demon Slayer?” Quiz.

The whole process was not much of a learning curve but there were a few gotchas. The original application used ASP, AJAX (with Prototype), and Javascript. Crossing the application over to Facebook was not as simple as copy and paste. Facebook applications are hosted on your own server first of all. Second, for security reasons Facebook restricts certain code. In particular, my application used RegEx which isn’t allowed. I had to get creative and come up with alternate code to perform the same task.  Portions of the Javascript had to be converted to FBJS (Facebook Javascript), the Facebook version of Javascript.

The next fun part was that Prototype wasn’t supported. (I was originally using Ajax.Updater) So I pretty much had to convert all references to FBJS’s AJAX object. The process was a bit time-consuming at first, but with the help of FireBug (which all serious developers should use) I figured out how to get the application talking to Facebook. The easiest part should have been manipulating DOM objects, but instead I had to figure out the exact way Facebook wanted it formatted since .style and .value can no longer be used.

If you are planning on converting an application I recommend that you list your application dependencies and then determine if Facebook allows them or if there are alternative solutions if they are not allowed.

I think the final product works great and already several people have used the quiz on Facebook.

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