Facebook APIs and Using PyFacebook

Facebook platform expose access to its data using RESTful interfaces. Your application can request profile, friend, Page, group, photo, and event data using these interfaces.

Here you would find all the Facebook APIs and their documentation along with some examples.

To get data from Facebook platform you are essentially making HTTP requests (GET or POST) with XML or JSON formatted data in requests and response. The APIs in the above mentioned link give enough information about the format of these messages.

PyFacebook is a pythonic library that takes care of making these HTTP requests and expose a nice object oriented interfaces for your application to use. One downside of PyFacebook is lack of documentation and even when you will look at the source code you may not get a good idea of how to use it (at least it was the case for me). The reason behind it is how this library has been written and demonstrates the power of dynamic languages and meta programming. It is really wonderful.

Here is an example of how from your application you would like to get the name of the user for whom you have his facebook uid.

pyfacebookObj.users.getInfo([fb_uid], ['name'])[0]

Here pyfacebookObj is an object of Facebook class exposed by PyFacebook. If you look inside the PyFacebook code you would not find a field "users" so from where this field is coming and as the above code snippet shows this field is essentially an object of class which has "getInfo" method.

So what PyFacebook is doing is that it is creating a class for each of the Facebook exposed data service with corresponding methods at runtime. These are called Proxy classes which are generating by an API specification. The interesting thing is that PyFacebook did not need to write lot of classes (and methods).

Magical.