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.

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.

Hello open-source fanatics! You may have noticed our recent move from ocpsoft.com to ocpsoft.org, and we would like to take a brief moment to explain this change. We have always been an open-source website, a group of technologists dedicated to the open-source programming model, but our domain name did not reflect this initiative. OCPsoft is an organization for shared open ideas, and in order to promote that reality, we have decided to take the risk at damaging our search rank in order to stay true to our ideals. If you would like to help us through this transition, you can do so by blogging about or linking to our new domain: ocpsoft.org, using the following HTML. Thank you for supporting open-source software! ~Lincoln, and The OCPsoft Team