Andy Milk Interactive

Recently I’ve been concepting and building several Facebook applications for my clients.  Some of them are stand-alone, from scratch, and don’t have a companion web site.  Others are extensions of existing web sites or applications.  Instead of building an application from scratch, populating data, cultivating a user base, these extended Facebook apps already have a regular web application’s data and functionality to build on.  I’ll post a link to an app soon that I’m building for one of my clients that does just that.  It’s ALMOST ready for prime time.

Facebook unveiled the new layout in July and, much to the chagrin of many apps developers, some parts of their API changed, forcing app developers to update their apps.  It wasn’t THAT bad, though, and they gave everyone plenty of warning.

For the app that we’re about to launch, I needed to build it in ColdFusion and there doesn’t seem to be many resources out there for ColdFusion with Facebook.  I found Dominic Watson’s library, which seems to work with the old Facebook layout.  Then I found Gavin’s library.

BIG thanks to Gavin (http://cffacebook.wordpress.com/) for taking Dominic’s library and bringing it up to speed with the New Facebook.  It was the first library that I was able to get setFBML working successfully.  It’s one of the most valuable tools in a Facebook application:  the ability to post content on the logged-in user’s profile.

Check out the app that Gavin created using ColdFusion and his own library:  http://apps.facebook.com/humorous/

I just wanted to give a shout out to Gavin for helping me stop banging my head against the wall trying to build a library or fix an existing one.

Cheers!