Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Agreement that FB API Sucks
Here's a post with a thoughtful discussion about the badness of the FB API--the Graph API in particular.
Facebook Developer Documentation
I'm writing a small Facebook application. So, of course, I'm reading their developer documentation, and I'm finding it's frequently just wrong!
That's a screenshot of a widget that's supposed to show you the results of loading an fb:iframe into your canvas page... Facebook can't even figure out how to do it!!
</rant>
Facebook is pushing out updates to its platform at a ridiculous pace. While this is a good thing for user applications (ie. Gmail, flickr, etc.), it is destructive for bodies of code intended to be platforms for 3rd party development. This is especially true if the documentation can't keep pace with the change.
I've worked with poorly documented software libraries in the past. The key difference here is I had the code available to read. I could always find out what I actually needed to pass into the code to make it work... Facebook's source code is not available. The only window into the platform is the documentation.
This is not the first Facebook Canvas application I've done. Given the option, I will not make Facebook applications in the future. Dealing with the api churn and poor documentation is such a time sink that it quickly becomes a net loss.
 |
| From: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fbml/iframe/ |
That's a screenshot of a widget that's supposed to show you the results of loading an fb:iframe into your canvas page... Facebook can't even figure out how to do it!!
</rant>
Facebook is pushing out updates to its platform at a ridiculous pace. While this is a good thing for user applications (ie. Gmail, flickr, etc.), it is destructive for bodies of code intended to be platforms for 3rd party development. This is especially true if the documentation can't keep pace with the change.
I've worked with poorly documented software libraries in the past. The key difference here is I had the code available to read. I could always find out what I actually needed to pass into the code to make it work... Facebook's source code is not available. The only window into the platform is the documentation.
This is not the first Facebook Canvas application I've done. Given the option, I will not make Facebook applications in the future. Dealing with the api churn and poor documentation is such a time sink that it quickly becomes a net loss.
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