differentiation to spring social Facebook

[Vad1mo]

Hello Benoit,

this is not an issue regarding facebook sdk grails plugin but a more of a questions.

What is the differentiation to spring social fb? It seems to me that your plugin covers areas that fb social doesn't. Would you mind adding a FAQ section and elaborate on the topic. In what areas does this plugin differ to FB social?

best regards,

Vadimo

[benorama]

Good idea, but I'll have to dig again into FB Social. When I started this plugin, none of Grails plugins answered our requirements and they did not support OAuth 2.0, required by Facebook few months ago.

Moreover, I already wrote a port of the official Facebook PHP SDK to ColdFusion (https://github.com/affinitiz/facebook-cf-sdk), so I already had a good understanding of the PHP SDK.

Our objective is to provide a complete SDK that covers all the requirements to build Facebook Apps :

• authentication for apps running on apps.facebook.com
• authentication for apps running on websites (aka Facebook Connect)
• 100% Graph/Rest APIs connectivity
• taglib for Facebook JS SDK integration.

We need a complete Grails Facebook SDK because we are currently porting our AgoraPulse, Facebook Marketing & CRM platform from ColdFusion to Grails : Facebook Platform support is key to our business... In a few months, this SDK is going to be heavily used in production. So, we plan to update it regularly to follow the "ever-changing" Facebook Platform ;).

Compared to other existing plugins, from what I understand from their docs :

• Spring Social Facebook plugin (updated 5 months agao) is only for Graph/Rest API connectivity and it only supports few Graph APIs (I did not see a way to execute FQL queries, batched requests...)
• Facebook Connect authentication support for the Spring Security plugin (updated 3 days ago) is only for authentication for apps running on websites
• Facebook Connect plugin (updated more than 1 year ago) provides authentication for apps running on websites (but does not support the required OAuth 2.0 compliance) and very basic support for Graph APIs,
• Facebook Graph plugin (updated 3 mont ago) provides authentication for apps running on websites (OAuth 2.0 compliant) and very basic support for Graph APIs.

Graph/Rest API connectivity in our SDK is based on wrapper around the rock solid RestFB java library, so it provides support for nearly all Graph APIs, FQL, batch requests ... Moreover, RestFB is 100% java-based, so I suppose that it is more efficient than Facebook Connect / Graph plugin Graph API clients (groovy-based).

It looks like our SDK is the only one to provide support for apps running on Facebook.com, but I might be wrong.

Have you used the other plugins? Can you see other differences?

Thank you!

[Vad1mo]

Hello Benoit

great outlined! I had my suspicions, but because I didn't use any of the Plugins I didn't wan't to spread FUD. I was looking for a plugin to be able to create a Facebook App and yours was the only one which had an example doing so.

I can only add an additional advice to others developers out there, to stick to an API the update frequently or use the FB one if there is one. FB tends to change its API frequently and does not guaranty backwards compatibility.

Thank you for the outline.