April 18th, 2012 by Craig Schwarzwald

Creating a Facebook App with Java – Part 4 – Integration Testing With Arquillian

Close your eyes, take a deep breath, then repeat after me: “Trying to test any Enterprise application by manually executing a test suite is just preposterous, and an application with any complexity at all quickly becomes too burdensome to test without automation.” Now repeat it a hundred times – still think you can live without automation? In part one we set up our tools, part two we did project configuration, and in part three we ended with a fully functional application; however, now that you’ve become familiar with the Red Hat tools and Facebook API, it’s time we get to a topic we ideally should have started with in the first place: TESTING!
March 4th, 2012 by Craig Schwarzwald

Creating a Facebook App with Java – Part 3 – The Web Service and the Game

This is the third article in the series of Creating a Facebook App with Java. In the first and second articles we set up a number of tools, and used the Facebook JavaScript API to retrieve our personal account information, as well as some information about our friends. In this article we will set up the Web Service (in Java) that will house all of our game logic. Remember we want to maintain separation of concerns, so if you ever find yourself putting if statements, or other logic in your html pages, you may be doing something that will be expensive or time-consuming to change later. After our Web Service is set up, we’ll start to tie our webpages to it, and then build out our actual game!
February 26th, 2012 by Craig Schwarzwald

Creating a Facebook App with Java – Part 2 – Application, Hosting, and Basic Functionality

The first article in our series took care of setting up and installing an IDE, some tools, and signing up for your new app at Facebook. Now we’ll begin creating the Web application with a landing page and some basic Facebook API calls. We’ll be creating our web application using Forge – where we left off in the part one. Because Forge allows us to start our new application very easily, and streamlines things like adding persistence (and eventually Arquillian, the testing framework) with a single command.
February 24th, 2012 by Craig Schwarzwald

Creating a Facebook App with Java – Part 1 – Setup and Tool Installation

We’ve all heard of “mobile apps” that are sweeping the internet – stories of developers creating hit apps in their parents basements, or while having coffees at Starbucks. They strike it rich, quit their jobs, and retire wealthy before the age of 25; but first, lets set some reasonable expectations. Those stories do happen, and they make the news because they’re fun to hear about, but you might want to consider playing the lottery for some better odds if you really think you’re next. I strongly believe that mobile apps (and/or HTML5 webpage apps) are the future of software development. Beyond that, social media is going to keep playing a greater and greater role in these applications. This article will take you through setting up a new Facebook app, from beginning to end. It is assumed that you are a developer, and as such are working on some UNIX based platform (all examples in this article will be from Ubuntu 11.10). Those working on Windows (like I may have been just last year) will have to find equivalent commands for certain parts. It is worth noting here that I am not a JBoss employee, nor am I affiliated with them in any way. However I am friends with several of their lead developers, which probably helped my initial gravitation in that direction. You will see me reference JBoss projects many times throughout this tutorial, and while you are always free to use your own alternatives, you may need to deviate from my instructions to do so.