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Here’s some techniques I picked up during Funhouse Photo’s development.
Create a dummy user for testing notifications
Unless you’ve got a trusting friend willing to give you access to their account, you’ll need a second account for yourself to make sure that your notification and request code is working. This made me a bit uncomfortable, since one of the things I like about Facebook is how closely accounts correspond with real people. I did try to get by without using a second account for a while, and gave up when I realized I was probably starting to spam my friends, since it was sometimes unclear if a message had actually been sent.
Have a second copy of your app to use as a sandbox
I’m sure this is standard web app development practice, but as a client programmer, it wasn’t immediately obvious. Create a second app in Facebook (Funhouse Photo Testbed in my case) and use that for all your development work. When you’ve got a new version stable, change the config and copy it over the old version, so users see an instant change from one version to another.
Enable debug output from the API
Add this line to the top of your PHP files, before you include facebook.php
$GLOBALS['facebook_config']['debug']=true;
You’ll now see output for every facebook call you make. I wasn’t able to twirl open the categories, so I also edited call_method() in facebookapi_php5_restlib.php to have their styles default to visible.
Use GET rather than POST for passing data
I find it a lot easier to check the address bar to understand what data’s being passed than find ways to dig into the POST data (eg using LiveHttpHeaders). This is against the standard meaning of GET, since it’s not supposed to have any side-effects, but I’ve left it active in the released version anyway, since I enjoy life on the edge. It’s probably preferable to switch to POST for releases, and I’ll be looking at that in the future.
