Possibilities for PHP on social media
The importance and forms of interaction of programming language PHP with the different social networks – in particular Facebook – will be shown in one of the lectures given by Jota Junior – a young enthusiast of PHP and free software in general and founder of the Lyla project, software that uses the networks to publish data of missing people – at Latinoware 2012. Check out the complete interview:
- How does PHP interact with social media and how are they important?
There many different forms of interaction. Services como o Facebook Developers make available SDKs (specific libraries in PHP), Open Graph (REST Api) among other possibilities, including in the tools (in Facebook PHP SDK requests can be sent to the server in different forms, and one very interesting one is Facebook Query Language, similar to Data Base SQL).
Other software, like Twitter do not allow so much freedom, but even so make available a library (tmhOauth) and a REST Api which make development very easy, once their form of operation is understood. And OAuth, in separate, is a resource used by most libraries enabling interaction with these sites in a standardized and secure way.
- What are the functionalities of OAuth? Is it easy to implement?
The important thing in order to use this resource powerfully is, initially, to understand the power of socil networks. They have opened up a totally new and incredibly broad horizon, where businesses and different tools can take advantage of this potential to grow. Today, people do not just read an article; they read them and show them to your friends , recommending they read it too! Understanding this is the first step.
After going through this nearly ‘phylosophical’ (hehe) portion, understanding well the concepts for basic for REST Apis, Permissions, what can and cannot be done, what is convenient and what is not – gives you nearly all you need . Then, it is just a matter of starting to write code and test the libraries! At times there may be a challenge in terms of performance, number of requests, but it is all tangible.
- What can the audience expect from your presentation?
Well, the audience can expect a very elucidating presentation! After a few complex projects involving interaction with social media , I thrashed about some, lost a lot of the little hair I had with some of the problems that I will alert to and show how to work around , and if they understand what I will explain, they will not even be problems. Definitively, this is the first step for people wishing to enter this promising market!
