Facebook – Flash Client Library

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Facebook – Flash Client Library

By Francis Bourre ⋅ 11 janvier 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Today, I spent few hours to play with Facebook Javascript client library. While I was playing with it, I started to build a little library to fit my needs for a game project.
I built something compact, there’s only 2 classes at the moment (client class and its event class). Sobriety !
It uses a JavaScript proxy like FaceBookBridge library from ZeroFractal, but the approach is a bit different. That’s a matter a lot of design and code perspective. I wanted simplicity and visibility, like remoting API.
Let me show you !

You have to make direct method calls on the client (as you would with JavaScript library). It returns a responder instance on each call:

var responder : EventDispatcher = client.Friends.get() as EventDispatcher;

To get some request results, you can suscribe listeners (as many as you want) to any responder:

responder.addEventListener(FacebookClientEvent.ON_RESULT, onFriends);
responder.addEventListener(FacebookClientEvent.ON_FAULT, onError);

And guess what, results are encapsulated in events passed as arguments to your callback methods:

public function onFriends( e : FacebookClientEvent ) : void
{
	trace ( e.methodName + " call: " + e.result.length );
}

Clean and easy as I like it.
Last but not least, you got some errors reporting. I had hard time on this part, coz the JS implementation was acting weird. I’m not even sure at this time to have understood the whole error process. I must finalize this part, few errors aren’t caught at this time but every transaction is logged in firebug with Debug.dump JS calls.

public function onError( e : FacebookClientEvent = null ) : void
{
	trace ( "onGetInfoError(" + "method:" + e.methodName 
				+ ", error_code:" + e.result.error_code 
				+ ", error_msg:" + e.result.error_msg + ")" );
}

Here’s a short demo to end the teasing around this project.
In this example, client retrieves all the name and profile photos urls of a user friends list through 2 API calls.

package  
{
	import com.bourre.facebookflashapi.FacebookClient;
	import com.bourre.facebookflashapi.FacebookClientEvent;
 
	import flash.display.Sprite;
	import flash.events.EventDispatcher;
 
	public class FacebookClientTest 
		extends Sprite 
	{
		protected var client : FacebookClient;
 
		public function FacebookClientTest()
		{
			client = new FacebookClient();
 
			var responder : EventDispatcher = (client.Friends.get() as EventDispatcher);
			responder.addEventListener(FacebookClientEvent.ON_RESULT, onFriends);
			responder.addEventListener(FacebookClientEvent.ON_FAULT, onError);
		}
 
		public function onError( e : FacebookClientEvent = null ) : void
		{
			trace ( "onGetInfoError(" + "method:" + e.methodName 
						+ ", error_code:" + e.result.error_code 
						+ ", error_msg:" + e.result.error_msg + ")" );
		}
 
		public function onFriends( e : FacebookClientEvent ) : void
		{
			trace ( e.methodName + " call" );
 
			( client.users.getInfo( {uids:e.result, fields:["name", "pic_big"]} ) 
			as EventDispatcher).addEventListener(FacebookClientEvent.ON_RESULT, onGetInfo);
		}
 
		public function onGetInfo( e : FacebookClientEvent ) : void
		{
			for each ( var o : Object in e.result ) 
				trace ( "Nom:" + o.name + ", Image:" + o.pic_big );
		}
	}
}

I will release the source code under an open source licence when it’ll be a bit more polished for people who want to try it, and maybe I’ll make a video tutorial, who knows !

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Tags: actionscript, client, facebook, flash, library, tech, work

Discussion

5 comments for “Facebook – Flash Client Library”

un Domingo con as3 con @francisbourre: Facebook – Flash Client Library | http://tinyurl.com/6vcejm

Tweeted by papachan (dan loaiza) | janvier 11, 2009, 8:24
Seems great !!!

Any chance to see it in a near futur ? :)

Regards

Posted by Florent | janvier 18, 2009, 18:42
sounds good Francis! let me know if you found some time to make this ressource and/or video available :) … et bon courage pour ton dem’ si ce n’ est deja fait!

biz

Posted by val aka elimak | février 3, 2009, 11:08
@florent and elimak « Something’s coming, don’t know when, but it’s soon… Will it be? Yes, it will.
Maybe just by holding still, It’ll be there! »

I’m done with my house moving shit, so I should plan some dedicated time soonto polish the whole thing.

Posted by Francis Bourre | février 3, 2009, 21:28
Is the lib ready for public release?

Posted by seb | février 23, 2009, 14:04

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