Unit Tests Come to RFacebook

Finally, RFacebook on Rails has a unit testing suite. You can now run Rails testing like any other well-behaved Rails plugin. My apologies - this was a long time coming.

RFacebook Looking for Developers

The RFacebook project has been maintained mostly by myself, in addition to the very helpful patches of a few others (Evan Weaver and Scott Nedderman, to name just a few). In the coming months I will be quite busy, and I am looking for other developers that can help maintain the project.

To help ease new developers into the library, I’ve done a few things starting with version 0.9.2 of the gem:

• Cleaned up the core - the API library is now cleaned up of cruft and is much easier to understand
• Better documentation - the core API library is extensively documented, and the plugin extensions are getting better documentation as well.
• Unit testing is well-separated - it is fairly simple to see where to place unit tests for any one component of RFacebook. Unit tests are organized into separate tests for Rails controller, model, sessions, plugin initialization, and core API calls.

Hopefully there are some great Rails developers that would like to contribute to what I think has become a pretty solid library, thanks to the already sizeable contributions of its users. With continuous vetting by tons of small developers, and a few large ones (like Causes), RFacebook should continue to provide a great, simple way to get into the Facebook Platform.

The newest RFacebook gem is released. This release should fix some more session issues, as well as give you better backtraces inside Facebook (when using the Facebook Debug Panel).

Short list of changes:

• added basic backtrace rendering to Facebook Debug Panel
• added “raw_xml” method to the Facepricot responses
• parsing of facebook.yml is more helpful when you specify absolute URLs instead of relative paths
• improved usage of fb_sig_session_key to create Rails sessions
• miscellaneous corner case fixes to url_for and redirect_to

Hope this helps people out. Initial feedback sounds like it is a pretty solid release.

The latest gem (0.8.8) adds support for mock ajax and Rails sessions when you are inside the Facebook Canvas. Detailed summary below

• Rails session[] and flash[] work (only ActiveRecord and PStore session containers, memcached store in a future release)
• Added in_mock_ajax? to all controllers, so that you know when you are handling a mock ajax operation
• Added support for a new url_for parameter, :mock_ajax => true, so that you can override the http://app.facebook.com rewriting (since mock ajax URLs have to be absolute)
• Fixed a bug where ampersands were being converted to &amp entities in URLs received from the API. Now, you can use fbsession.notifications_sendRequest(…).response, and the entities will automatically be gsub’ed with real ampersands

Thanks to everyone who filed bugs and contributed patches for this release! It’s looking pretty solid.

Another update - wow these are coming fast now. This weekend I finished up another fairly major upgrade to RFacebook: a true Rails plugin. Features include:

• fbsession and fbparams in both controllers and views
• automatic URL rewriting when you are in the Canvas (all URLs made relative to apps.facebook.com)
• acts_as_facebook_user
• a unique debug panel to help with common issues
• configuration via facebook.yml file
• easy SSH tunneling so that you can develop from your local machine
• no need to keep the plugin up to date - it stays up to date with the Gem

You can get all the information and documentation here: rfacebook.rubyforge.org.

Hope you enjoy the new features.