In this quick tutorial I’m going to show you how to make a simple “return all” application for facebook. Before you start take a look at the Facebook Developers page and the Facebook Developers Wiki as it’s full of useful stuff.

The Core Components

• API – Lets you talk to the facebook servers. [put picture here explaining in detail]
• FBML – Facebook markup language, it’s like a cute little html snippet which facebook turns into normal HTML.
• XFBML – A javascript which lets you use FBML in iframes.
• FQL – Lets you run SQL type query’s.
• FBJS – This changes your javascript so you can only work within a close environment.
• PHP Client Libraries – The PHP Facebook provides to communicate with their servers.

The fun stuff

Assuming you have downloaded the required files, you can now start playing with the facebook API. Here is the basic shell for any Facebook application:

As you guessed, that does basically just returns the data sent by facebook. If you want to try this out yourself, take a look at the Facebook Developer App.