Jan 11
Facebook Development Sucks
Sometimes when you have a burgeoning web design company, you find yourself doings things you wouldn’t normally want to do. This weekend was such an occasion as I completed my first soup to nuts Facebook application for a local radio show.
Now let me be straight – Helping a radio show I like (with all things web) is something that I would do happily, especially when I met one of the hosts last year during a crazy ice storm where I found myself stranded and he couldn’t've been nicer. But I swear… If I knew what I did now, regarding how much work it would take to get this App off the ground… I don’t even know. I think it took me about 2 days work of straight programming to get this done and it was some of the most frustrating work I’ve done in quite some time.
I Have Developing for Facebook
Like most of the things I work on intensely, my wife gets to see all the peaks and valleys of the journey. Well this was no difference, and after two days of burying my head in my hands and occasionally pounding my fists on my desk, my wife asked “What’s wrong?” Now usually this question would drive me up a wall but she’s getting to be really good at finding the right times to ask these questions, so I answered her in words that she would understand…
- Facebook’s developer documentation sucks
- There doesn’t seem to be clear instructions on how to setup your dev environment
- The tutorials don’t help that much and seem to use nothing but depreciated functions
Now maybe I’m way off on the above but look, I think of myself as a developer. And I’d like to think that over the past two days of furious work that if the above were NOT the case, I would know it by now. So I could go on and on and let this Facebook rage consume me talking about all the problems I had and what I did to try and fix them… But instead I will tell you about what irked me the most…
Facebook Has Crappy Documentation
Over the weekend I would run into the same code snippets from the same PHP tutorial using Profile.setFBML. (You’d think I’d run into other tutorials but there seems to be only one PHP tutorial people can find for Facebook). Anyway, when trying to figure out why this Profile.setFBML wasn’t performing as expected, I pulled up the following on Facebook’s Wiki:
So this is great. Not only will this method be depreciated, but it will happen oh… RIGHT ABOUT NOW. Unfortunately we don’t know if it HAS been depreciated or NOT, so I guess we gotta just roll the dice if we’re going to use it and hope that the depreciation hammer hasn’t fallen. Oh, and if you follow that next line about “application tabs” you know, if you wanted to program for the future, there’s basically no functional information in there either and instead points us again to the Developer Roadmap. If you go THERE, you will see the following:
And if you click “Detail” you get this: “Going forward (in the short term) application tabs will be the only way applications can integrate into profiles and Facebook Pages.” Soooooooo, application tabs are coming SOMETIME in early 2010 (but nobody knows when) and it will be the only way to integrate your apps into the profile, BUT there’s nowhere to find information on how to do it… *GROAN*
Again, this was an exceedingly frustrating weekend, but I got the App done, the programming is awful and sorely needs to be cleaned up but a Win is a Win. Screw you Facebook.
May 11th, 2010 at 5:21 pm
well said!
May 11th, 2010 at 5:27 pm
@Zim – I’m guessing you’ve been messing around with it too friendo?
June 12th, 2010 at 10:45 pm
Months after this post, I found myself on the same situation. I hate hate FB app development.
June 25th, 2010 at 1:33 pm
Hear hear. I think you went nice on them too. All the links on their own site point to outdated documentation, and there are either no coding examples or no screenshots (or other) of the sample code they do provide. It really is amazing that with all the development going on there that the documentation (and available tutorials/examples) aren’t a lot better.
June 29th, 2010 at 4:27 am
@mives – “hate hate” is right.
@Lance – Couldn’t agree more. And you know since writing this post I have done ZERO Facebook development. Hallelujah.
July 12th, 2010 at 5:47 pm
Don’t forget about the lack of FB developers’ support on their own forum. They seem nonexistent. I hope some real competition comes along soon so maybe they might actually be more proactive supporting their own stupid application. (If I didn’t have clients asking for FB pages I wouldn’t touch the site at all).
July 12th, 2010 at 6:30 pm
@Akexys – Could the process be anymore frustrating? I might kill myself if I ever have write another FB app I swear.
November 23rd, 2010 at 4:25 pm
I realize it’s been a few month since this post but this is happening to me right now. I have to write a facebook app for my work and I’m struggling to find up to date tutorials since all of them appear to be based on elements that fb is phasing out.
November 30th, 2010 at 1:40 pm
I’ve been working on my first facebook app for a little over three weeks. Right now, the state of the documentation is still pretty bad: although they’ve made some efforts to clean it up, the transition from the old API to the new one has left tire tracks on the web.
First, they’ve removed wiki.developers.facebook.com. All links to the wiki are now rewritten as a search request to the new documentation. When I google a question about how to do something in facebook, most of the results that come up have a link to the wiki. The results that come up often end up being circular – I click one of them and end up at the same place in the documentation where I started – unable to find the solution to my problem, which was why I was using google in the first place.
Second, there are still very few usable real-world examples. At every step along the way, the documentation seems to assume prior knowledge of the API that I don’t have. Every API call in the documentation needs to have a functioning code sample that I can just copy and paste and examine how it works. I’ve gone back and re-read the docs several times, but a lot of what I know about it now has come from other sources on the web.
Third, of the examples that are there, a lot of them simply don’t work. With the curl examples, I get errors that aren’t documented. When I finally figure out how to send the requests without errors, I simply get no results.
I could go on. This seems to be symptomatic of all levels of FB documentation.
March 1st, 2011 at 8:31 pm
http://blog.millermedeiros.com/2010/05/facebook-you-are-doing-it-wrong/
its sucks big time
March 2nd, 2011 at 11:30 am
@Chris @Deepak – The best thing that has happened to me since writing this post is that I have done ZERO Facebook development. Here’s hoping I never have to again!
April 5th, 2011 at 3:10 pm
Couldn’t agree more. Not only does the documentation suck, but it seems that bugs never get resolved. And by the time they do get resolved Facebook decides to change everything.
June 2nd, 2011 at 4:01 am
Guess what, here more than a year later, I’m trying to make a facebook app, and the examples they have in their documentation simply doesn’t work. I have to replace paramater names to accomodate their new ones, and the values they say are the default, are no longer the default.
The documentation is poorly written, and not updated.