CF and rudimentary Facebook

[csteinhilber]

Rather than a full-on Facebook widget on my client's site, I'd like to have a simple div that lists the number of Fans/Friends for their corporate Facebook userid.

I was hoping to just accomplish this via SOAP or other HTTP request, server-side, using ColdFusion. But it appears that the older, simple Facebook API has been deprecated and no longer returns data... so I'm left looking for a really simple way to dynamically pull the number of friends. Seems like the CFFBML components and the like would really be overkill. This wouldn't really be a "Facebook Application", IMHO.

Anybody have any ideas?
-Carl

 

[FALCONSEYE]

How about converting this to cfm?

http://wiki.developers.facebook.com..._if_they_are_friends_among_themselves_already

All you gotta do is call the webservice, << friends_get() >> and output ArrayLen() of the result of friends_get()

http://www.fuzzysiberians.com

 

[csteinhilber]

Thanks Falconseye.
There are actually CF conversions of similar code (and existing CF libs and CFCs) already, so that isn't really the problem.

My issue is I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around Facebook's insistence on making this thing an "application".

When I go to the Facebook application developers setup, it keeps talking about a canvas page, and the ability for other users to add my application to their pages. I don't want a "canvas page" (as I understand it), and I don't really want others to add anything to their page(s), nor do I really want anyone else to know that I have an application period.

To me, this isn't an application in the way that Facebook is defining applications. All it is is a call to Facebook that returns a value. And then I plug that value into my website.

It's ONLY going to live on my website. NOT on my Facebook page, and certainly not on anyone ELSE'S Facebook page. Yet, when you go through the process of creating an API Key to be able to make calls into the FB API, they pretty much want to force you down a different road.

It's very frustrating. How can I get access to Facebook data, without actually creating an "application".