Assuming you are familiar with one of the languages that there are Facebook API libraries (check out the Developers wiki for a list of them), it should be relatively straight forward.
There are a couple of strange things that are not similar to others that are due to the implementation of embedding your application inside Facebook:
- The place where you are developing your Facebook application must be accessible to the world. The way Facebook applications work is by posting their data into your application's page, so even for testing purposes your application must be accessible to the world (and of course to the Facebook servers
). - Some of the actions in Facebook will not occur immediately like updating the user's profile box.
- Learning FBML might be a bit annoying at first but makes the experience for your users from Facebook a lot smoother.
All in all, it took me a couple of hours (under 5) to write the hCard application in PHP.
The application is very simple in Facebook API terms since it uses two APIs, one to get the user's information and the other to set the profile box information in the user's profile (setFBML).
It simply adds the hCard microformat support to your Facebook profile.
To perform a stronger integration with a full blown application like Yedda Questions & Answers Facebook application (
) it takes a bit more time.