Question

Facebook document that you need to do the following for canvas login

1. Include facebook library
2. Instantiate class with App Id and secret

3. Check that the user has a valid session

   If they do check also that you can get there user object by doing an api call /me

   If they dont then process the login redirect

All this especially the Facebook calls can take quite some time to process

The example shows this in terms of code
http://github.com/facebook/php-sdk/blob/master/examples/example.php

And from what I read it seems required on every page. Because a user can logout / remove app / change permissions etc during the session

My question is what is the ideal way of doing the above in terms of performance gains, but still making sure that it conforms to the nuiances of facebook.

Facebook do give a session expire time which seems to be in GMT.

I code in PHP using the Zend Framework but I suppose the above relates to all languages.

Appreciate your help on this

Answer 1

Ian, store your user facebook credentials in the user related table (or whatever)

facebook_user_id
facebook_secret
facebook_token

make it come out like something like:

$user->facebook_session_array();

Then just pass that into your api class when you want to reuse it. There is nothing you can do to make the oauth process (on authentication) go any faster because it has to happen live.

Cache the living daylights out of anything and everything you bring back from facebook.. run some crons in the background to either insert that stuff to table or stamp it down on a drive. Your cron script should be able to handle potential rate limitations. I wrote some, but facebook is so slow, I think it was pointless.

Facebook is slow.. don’t make your app wait for it in any way you can avoid it.