Question

I am creating a little flash game for the facebook platform, but I am finding it very difficult to get any decent documentation on the graph api and the PHP SDK, so if anyone has a decent resource for a beginner to go and learn the basics, I would appreciate it very much, as I am struggling to grasp the concept.

Thanx!

Answer 1

I agree that the docs can be pretty hard work for facebook. If you are looking to use the Graph API tho, bear in mind that it is just a REST API that uses oAuth for authentication, much the same as Twitter, SoundCloud etc.

The most awkward bit I found was authenticating properly so I would suggest checking out the oAuth website

http://oauth.net/

They also have some PHP samples which were what I used as a starting point. I’d definitely recommend starting from these rather than trying to build your own setup from scratch.

http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/php/

I also found it handy to refer to the docs on some of the other sites that use oAuth, such as Twitter and SoundCloud as it helped build my overall understanding of what is going on, even if there were a few small differences from one site to another

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Authentication

http://wiki.github.com/soundcloud/api/02-authentication

Personally I would suggest just trying to do a basic oAuth-authenticated request to begin with. Facebook Graph has a few extra options such as using scope for extended permissions. Whilst you will probably need to use these in the end, once you get your head round the signing mechanism its easy enough to add in these extra details.

Once you have got the hang of signing requests, it is just a case of requesting the appropriate endpoint for what you want using either curl or any other method that takes your fancy.

Hope this is of some use