Ajax for Facebook

Facebook is the fastest rising social networking website in the world. Developed by Mark Zuckerberg, this social network started out as a social networking website within schools. Through Facebook, schools and universities would have the ability to freely post that are only exclusive to their school without any fee. Because of its popularity in universities, professors and major organizations posted pictures articles and even small assignments to students who also connect to other organizations.

After sometime, the social network site eventually went out of university setting – eventually opening its doors to the world. It may be the timing or the already popular support but even during the rumored opening of Facebook has already hyped millions of potential users. Today, new users of Facebook are increasing at an exponential level eventually challenging MySpace, Orkut, Friendster and other social networks in supremacy.

What made this social network very popular is its application platform. Although touted with security risks at first, developers today are scrambling to build the next best Facebook application. From games, tools and even for productivity purposes, website after website has developed Facebook applications so that users can just go to Facebook, install the online application and access the webpage from there.

Facebook has developed their own development platform so that developers could easily build their own application.

If you are interested in Ajax for Facebook, you have to start with the basic language of Ajax – JavaScript. The coding of JavaScript is different in Facebook. In this platform JavaScript is not coded directly. They are instead parsed which is a little bit of a challenge at first for first time JavaScript developers.

There are two reasons why Facebook has opted to parse JavaScript in their application. First, Facebook has been scored time and again for their security lapses. As a social network, you would expect that underage teens will be signing up and feverously use the website. Security has to be the first priority of any website. Second is to limit the scope of the application. If you are a Facebook user, you will notice that the function of the application is somehow limited. Although this is not the direct effect of parsing, it somehow limits the bounds of an application.

If you are planning to move to Ajax with the use of additional functions, Facebook does not let you execute Ajax directly but it uses proxies so that you can still use Ajax based codes to implement an application. Complimenting with JavaScript, Facebook has a set of commands set for developers who wanted to launch an application in their platform. Instead of using XML, Facebook prefers that developers use JSON or FBML. JSON is the markup for JavaScript while FBML stands for Facebook Markup Language which is native to Facebook alone.

The main challenge for developers who wanted to build JavaScript or Ajax based applications have to work with Facebook’s parsing. For security reasons, developers have to deal with this practice. Even with this practice, it does not in anyway hinder the performance of your JavaScript or Ajax based application.