[Mono-list] Mono.Facebook

[R. Tyler Ballance]

On Dec 19, 2007, at 10:49 PM, Julien Sobrier wrote:
> I was wondering what is the status of this library, and what is  
> planned
> for the future. Do you recommend to use this one rather than the
> "official" one? What is the difference between Mon.Facebook and
> Mono.Faceebook.Platform?

Mono.Facebook is the "current" implementation, tied to XmlDocument and  
uses the XML response type. I started Mono.Facebook.Platform to target  
platform applications specifically and uses JSON as the response type  
(which is much smaller in terms of transport time and sometimes in  
terms of Facebook's generation of data).

Currently I would use Mono.Facebook for anything "production" since  
Mono.Facebook.Platform is still in a state of flux and very-very- 
alpha. When I'm "done" it'll support almost everything you would want  
to do with ASP.NET Facebook platform applications and it will also  
support the Bebo platform (similar, but has some quirks) as well, out  
of the box. Mono.Facebook.Platform also requires you use the .NET 2.0  
profile and gmcs.

> BTW,  there are 2 API I couldn't find in Mono.Facebook
> * session valiation: find out if a session is valid from the Faebook  
> URI
> parameters, private and public key (without actually tryingto  
> establish
> the facebook session, as described at the end of
> http://developers.facebook.com/documentation.php?doc=auth)
> * ordered list of friends: it is not possible to oder a list of Friend
> simple bythe  last name to match the way Facebook oders it under the
> Friends tab. For example, if a last name is made of 2 words like "de
> Vaux", Facebook puts it at V, not at D. I guess it is the same thing  
> for
> "van ...", "von ...", etc.

Session validation doesn't necessarily apply to  
Mono.Facebook.Platform, since you can accomplish these tasks through  
the RequireAdd or RequireLogin methods. As for ordering of friends  
lists this is only possible (at all, regardless of library) by using  
FQL with the "ORDER BY" token, which isn't currently supported by  
Bebo's implementation.

If you're curious about trying out Mono.Facebook.Platform, I haven't  
documented much if anything, but I've written an application that's  
currently live and chugging along with users called "Why are you  
awesome?" (http://apps.facebook.com/whyareyouawesome/) you can grab  
the source code with: svn co https://source.geekisp.com/bleep/trunk/WhyAreYouAwesome/

As for Mono.Facebook, there are some examples in the examples/  
directory; let me know if you need any further help :)


Cheers,
-R. Tyler Ballance
Slide, Inc.