At Intridea, we’ve been busy little beavers working on a couple of hush-hush facebook apps. Needless to say, you will be hearing about those quite soon. But first, a little discussion about Rails plugins for the Facebook F8 API is in order.
The most popular Rails plugin for the Facebook API is RFacebook. The core implementation of RFacebook relies a lot on Hpricot and method_missing (covered earlier in this post) to map the XML results from Facebook to Ruby objects.
There are a few goodies in RFacebook: SSH tunnelling, URL rewriting, and a nice debug panel that displays right on the facebook canvas. RFacebook is becoming more and more mature by the day, but unfortunately maturity sometimes does not equal usability or productivity (by Rails standards, of course). My main issue with RFacebook however, is the convoluted MVC design. For example, facebook session calls are made through a fbsession object. However, this object is accessible only within the controllers, and not the models. Moreover, fbsession objects use method_missing to transfer methods not defined in the ruby code over to Facebook, and so there is no concrete mapping between functions and their variables—it makes things like passing partials instead of strings as parameters for session calls in the controller more difficult, and lo and behold, we’re forced to use the ugliness that can only be mentioned as “html-code-in-the-controller”. Small things surely, but we use Rails and Ruby to “increase productivity and happiness”, and any libraries that have the possibility of being heavily used should be written with such things in mind.
A new contender is Facebooker written by Chad Fowler. He outlines the design points (most of which are vehement arguments against RFacebook’s way of doing things), in a very nice post. A quick look at the code (which is all I have done so far, more to come later) suggests that this is really a very concrete API, that maps functions to non-method_missing functions. However, it does have a bit of a learning curve right now and is well below RFacebook in terms of immediate user-friendliness, which is to be expected since it is still under development and has had no public announcement besides that blog post. More details as we move forward..
Running a quick search on ‘rails facebook plugins’ gives me more results today than it did a few weeks ago, so it seems apparent that there are a few more plugins left that I have missed. Along with that, the new release of Facebook’s Data Store will most definitely bring forth atleast a few more new ones.
