Professional Heroku Programming

Chapter 16

Building Social Applications with Heroku

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Writing Facebook applications with PHP
• Making Heroku applications social with the Chatter API

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=1118508998 on the Download Code tab. The code is in the Chapter 16 download and individually named according to the names throughout the chapter.

In the previous chapter we talked about the paradigm shift in application development toward mobile apps that are accessible anywhere, on any device. Around the same time as the mobile revolution, a paradigm shift was happening in the consumer world, with Myspace and Facebook creating groundbreaking apps that model social connections between users. This gave users a conduit to easily share information and connect with others online, regardless of location or time zone. This social revolution peaked during the Arab Spring, when dissidents of oppressive governments in the Middle East rose up against their overlords, organizing social revolution through these social networks.

It wasn’t long after the rise of social and mobile apps in the consumer space that this paradigm shift made its way to the business world. Businesses were already using social tools, such as instant messaging and products like Microsoft SharePoint, as document repositories that enabled collaboration. Salesforce.com’s release of Chatter, a social network targeted for the ...