Barcamppune-3: Developing Facebook application in Ruby on Rails.

Abhijit gave a talk on how to create and integrate an RoR application with much talked about Facebook platform.
Interesting fact to know was that, in about a months time "1500+" facebook applications have been developed and "65" million facebook applications have been downloaded.

Facebook allows developers to make their existing application(made in Java/ PHP, Ruby on Rails, many more platforms) or create new applications, integrate with Facebook platform.

Facebook API can be consumed by an application and then this application can appear in users profile on Facebook by Facebook Canvas or Iframe approach(where external appliction runs within an iframe in Facebook)

Abhijit mentioned about ILike, one of the most famous applications developed and integrated with Facebook platform.
Abhijit demonstrated how a Ruby on Rails application can be made run within facebook or independetly using the RFacebook, unofficial Ruby Facebook client library.

I wanted to present on exactly the same topic, but due to lack of time(read my laziness), I couldn't. I caught up with Abhijit to discuss some more details about Facebook platform and our discussion concluded with following,
1. Facebook has very limited javascript features in canvas mode.
2. Facebook users information can be pulled using API's for your application
3. Can be used for viral marketing. Developing a cut down facebook version for marketing your actual product.
4. Could be difficult to port an existing application to Facebook, especially with Canvas approach and FBML(Facebook markup language)

With this background now, I hope to do something in this area soon.