Beautiful Architecture

Supporting Functionality for the System

At this point, developer-created software is running on the Facebook services, incorporated as not just widgets but as full applications. Along the way, we’ve created a very different notion of a social web application. We started with the standard setup of isolated data, logic, and display of a typical web application, bereft of any social data except what users could be convinced to contribute. We’ve now fully progressed to an application consuming Facebook social data services while becoming itself an FBML service for full integration into the container site.

Facebook data has progressed a long way from the internal libraries discussed in the first section of this chapter. However, there are still a few important, common web scenarios and technologies that, up to this point, the Platform still does not support. In casting the application as a service returning FBML, instead of an HTML/CSS/JS endpoint consumed directly by a browser, we’ve stepped on the toes of some important assumptions about modern web applications. Let’s see how the Facebook Platform has rectified some of these problems.

Platform Cookies

The new web architecture of applications cuts out some technologies built into the browser, upon which many web stacks rely. Perhaps most importantly, browser cookies used to store information about a user’s interaction with the application stack are no longer available, since the consumer of the application’s endpoint is not a browser but ...