Sealhat.com

First post of 2007 is in mid-June? Inconceivable! Anyway, this post might be a bit shorter than I wanted it to be because WordPress decided to delete my original one when I hit “Save and Continue Editing”…GG.

So for the past couple weeks I’ve been working on this Xfire Stats application for Facebook. All it really does is take information from your public Xfire profile and display it in a nice way on your Facebook profile. Pretty simple, especially since the developers at Xfire Plus created a PHP script that parses the Xfire profiles for you and puts the data in a nice array. After that, it’s just a matter of displaying that data in HTML. Overall, the concept is pretty simple, but the whole Facebook development platform is kinda wonky (that’s the technical term).

Basically, Facebook apps show cached data on their servers. The data originates on my server though. This way, they can ensure the responsiveness of the data I suppose. The issue that I have is the whole “push” rather than “pull” model. Instead of Facebook pulling data from my server to be displayed on a profile, a user (or a crontab iterating through your whole database…eww) must push the data out to the users. This is very important for status applications. Unfortunately, many times my data isn’t refreshed. It might be an issue with my site’s responsiveness, but I don’t really think so since it’s really quite fast loading the same data through a regular browser. With only about one MySQL query per page load, it’s not all that much to transfer. What’s the deal? I dunno. It’s all quite hard to debug when there isn’t any log that I know of.

Anyway, I probably will only release this application to people that I know so that I can regulate its usage. After all, there really doesn’t seem to be that much of an upside to releasing a Facebook application as a single developer. Companies? Yes. They can quickly get hundreds of servers to handle the load and create a huge user base utilizing the Facebook users. Me? I don’t see anything but a large server bill. At least it looks nice on my profile.

Don’t let this discourage you from developing anything though. It was quite fun using Notepad++ for the first time, and I learned quite a bit about PHP (not that much about MySQL though since I use MSSQL so much at work).