I’m new to web development but have coding experience (Java) and I’m trying to build a Facebook application. The languages which I’m going to be using are HTML5, CSS, JS and PHP.
I’ve been skimming through Facebook development books and resources on the net and it seems that they cover the interaction of the web application with Facebook e.g retrieving information from the Facebook accounts, publishing to news feeds etc, but none of them cover actually building the applications. So :
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are integrated Facebook applications literally just websites which are rendered in the Facebook canvas which leverage functionality provided by Facebook through their API such as what I mentioned above?
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Is it therefore possible to just render an existing website in the Facebook canvas (with a little bit of additional coding such as app id and secret)?
I’m asking this because I unfortunately have no artistic flair and when I try to design webpages all the components seem to shuffle about! So I’m hoping that I can use a ready-made website template (such as those offered on ThemeForest), and was wondering whether it would be simple to load this in the canvas? I would like my app to be integrated because I need to use a lot of Facebook functionality which seems like it would be easier to use in the actual Facebook environment, and also the canvas is smaller so the view is usually much simpler than a standalone website.
Yes. A common misconception is Apps on Facebook are hosted on connected with Facebook. That’s totally wrong, when you use an app (most of the time) you are just looking at an iframe, which is a normal webpage on your server. You can choose two width’s for your canvas, see the options once you have created a Facebook App Page. See Facebook’s own tutorial for detailed info.