Introduction

All third-party systems that work with data from Facebook do so through the Facebook API, which is a combination of REST-style techniques, OAuth 2.0, and an ever-evolving combination of web technologies, collectively titled by Facebook as the Graph API.

Facebook provides developers with a number of different code libraries through its developer portal, and of these the only one that's completely client-side is the JavaScript SDK. But anything that JavaScript can do can be done by both ActionScript 3 and the Flash Platform, more or less.

You might think, having looked at the SDKs officially listed by Facebook in their developer portal, that you'd need to build a code library yourself but luckily for us, there's already an existing, officially supported, ActionScript 3 library for working with the Graph API. This library, the Facebook ActionScript 3 SDK, is supported by both Adobe and Facebook, so you can be assured that it will be kept up-to-date and fully functional, even if there is a significant overhaul of the Facebook APIs—after all, who better to support this SDK than Adobe and Facebook themselves?

There's no sense in recreating the wheel, as they say, so the examples in this cookbook will be using the existing Facebook ActionScript 3 SDK almost exclusively for its recipes. We'll also be using the Flex SDK 4.0 for our examples, as it's a quick and easy way to construct user interfaces and put together working prototypes for our recipes. However, using Flex isn't a requirement for the Facebook ActionScript 3 SDK to work—it's just for the examples in this Cookbook. Integrating the Facebook SDK with a normal ActionScript-only project or a Flash Professional-based project is entirely possible—it will just inevitably require a little more time creating the interface, but the ActionScript 3 code behind it all will work pretty much the same.

In this chapter we'll be getting ready to start developing with Facebook—we'll download the Facebook ActionScript 3 SDK, integrate that SDK with our Flash Builder workspace, set up our application on Facebook.com, and generally get everything set up that we need to before we can start communicating with the Facebook APIs.