Using Facebook Connect for your web application

With the exponential growth of Facebook over the past few years, it’s safe to say that quite a large number of active web users today own and use a Facebook account regularly. Facebook connect, which Facebook launched late 2008, is a set of APIs which allow you to integrate your users’ Facebook profile into your web application. Apart from allowing your visitors to login to your site using their Facebook identity (hence negating the registration process), it also allows you to leverage on the various social features of Facebook. Let’s take a overview of Facebook Connect, and how we can integrate it into our web application.

Facebook APIs

Facebook provides both RESTFUL and Javascript APIs. A great number of client libraries are available for creating your web application, though Facebook provides official support for only a handful of them. We will be using Facebook’s official PHP 5 client and Javascript libraries.

FQL and XFBML

Before we look delve deeper into Facebook connect integration, let’s look at FQL and XFBML – the two essential components of the Facebook connect platform.

FQL (yes, Facebook Query Language!) allows you to query data from Facebook easily using a SQL like…