I recently ported my app back to the old Javascript API; I wish I could say that it was for the superior older documentation, but it was actually because the new API randomly stopped returning my calls from time to time. All of the big moneymakers' apps are built on the older stuff, so I figure when it breaks, it gets a bit more love. The documentation is still shoddy, the Bing-powered documentation search is abysmal…
I’m done building Facebook apps for clients
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Re: I’m done building Facebook apps for clients
#12Re: I’m done building Facebook apps for clients
#13Re: I’m done building Facebook apps for clients
#14I recently ported my app back to the old Javascript API; I wish I could say that it was for the superior older documentation, but it was actually because the new API randomly stopped returning my calls from time to time. All of the big moneymakers' apps are built on the older stuff, so I figure when it breaks, it gets a bit more love. The documentation is still shoddy, the Bing-powered documentation search is abysmal…
It does seem as if someone over there is aware that the current situation is pretty awful, at least enough to say "we're working on it".
Re: I’m done building Facebook apps for clients
#15I found myself at times resorting the trawling through js source to find how I could use certain button images that were very simple in the old version.
I feel your frustration and am glad I don't really have to do much in the facebook space at the moment.
Re: I’m done building Facebook apps for clients
#16I like how Twitter has versioned their API, and I wish Facebook would do something similar. With 500+ developers and deep knowledge of backend changes, they should be able to handle the minor discrepancies instead of off loading that burden to platform developers.
Re: I’m done building Facebook apps for clients
#17Hiring a tech writer and sending your lead dev to scrum school won't help either. You need to value good work at work. If you're too busy worrying about how to skim by with less money or worried about losing your employees, you're too distracted. Work with fewer people, get less done, but make sure you do it right! Why do people need a primer on this? It is just common sense.
Re: I’m done building Facebook apps for clients
#18I think they do this on purpose - rapidly changing apis, and having poor or overly verbose documentation is a way to weed out all but the largest development companies, thereby reducing support costs, and allowing partnerships with the big companies that survive. It's right from microsoft's playbook.
Re: I’m done building Facebook apps for clients
#19This is Bret Taylor's Graph API - the concept simplified the API a lot, and companies like Freebase copied it for their own data. Too bad it is not working...
Re: I’m done building Facebook apps for clients
#20Several people have mentioned how bad the documentation is, but nobody has provided examples. In case anyone from Facebook (or "facebook" as it's sometimes called in the docs) reads this and cares, I'm putting some examples from the docs below.
The problem with having mistakes in the docs, is that as the reader notices more and more mistakes, they begin to have less and less confidence in everything that is written there. Once the documentation is suspect, every word in it is suspect.
Here's an example of a sentence lifted from the docs: "i whose fields and values can be inspected and accessed."
Yes, that was the entire sentence, if you can call it that.
How about: "Application can implement these interface to handle them."
Seems like a small error, but a more important message is given to the reader: You cannot trust this document.
Just to preempt an obvious reaction, yes, you shouldn't trust any document, but there are levels of trust, and this kind of grammar makes the trust fall quickly to a very low level.
Another one: "The FBSessionDelegate is a callback interface that your application should implement: it's methods will be invoked when the application successful login or logout."
Same message there. You can't trust this.
Then there are the code examples. Here's their example of how to use something the docs call a stream.publish flow:
NSMutableDictionary* params = [NSMutableDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys: apiKey, @"api_key", nil]; [facebook dialog: @"stream.publish" andParams: params andDelegate:self];
Ignoring the bizarre inconsistent use of spaces after colons, this example gives no clue about what else should be in the params object in order to make a publishable post. I could look it up on the Facebook developers (sic) site, but that data can't be trusted either since it changes so frequently and so little care is given to getting it right.