Sunday, November 8, 2009

Integrating Facebook Connect

After looking at the user and authentication management in the PHP code I figured that both of them so intertwined that it would be difficult to develop them separately so I am going to start integrating Facebook Connect for user authentication.

Facebook wiki also gives the description of a login session here

Facebook Connect is a technology used to delegate the authentication of users to Facebook platform. In a way it competes with technologies like openID, SAML and CardSpace.

What I really liked in Facebook Connect is their use of cross-domain communication channel  which enable it to ask the user for the credentials at the service provider (runaround in our case) website instead of redirecting to Facebook. I would also like to mention that the protocols that Facebook Connect use is proprietary unlike SAML and OpenID which are open protocols.

The library that I will using will be pyfacebook to communicate with Facebook platform.


First you need to sign up with Facebook developer which is described in great detail here.


It would be a good idea to also read Anatomy of a Facebook Connect Site but anyway in later posts I am going to explain the steps need to be taken in our Google App Engine webapp framework based runaround application.

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