Facebook Application Development

At Facebook's core is the social graph - people and the connections they have to everything they care about. Facebook Platform is the set of APIs and tools which enable you to integrate with the social graph to drive registration, personalization, and traffic - whether through applications on Facebook.com or external websites and devices. Get started with Facebook for:

• Websites
• Apps on Facebook.com
• Mobile apps

If you already develop with Facebook, read our upgrade guide to learn how to transition to our new tools.

Overview

Graph API
The Graph API is the core of Facebook Platform, enabling you to read and write data to Facebook. It provides a simple and consistent view of the social graph, uniformly representing objects (like people, photos, events, and pages) and the connections between them (like friendships, likes, and photo tags).

Authentication
Facebook authentication enables your application to interact with the Graph API on behalf of Facebook users, and it provides a powerful single-sign on mechanism across Web, mobile, and desktop apps.

Social plugins
Social plugins enable you to provide engaging social experiences to your users with just a line of HTML. Because the plugins are served by Facebook, the content is personalized to the viewer whether or not they have signed into your site.

Open Graph protocol
The Open Graph protocol enables you to integrate your pages into the social graph. These pages gain the functionality of other graph objects including profile links and stream updates for connected users.

API Reference

Core APIs

• Graph API
• Social plugins

Facebook SDKs

• JavaScript SDK
• PHP SDK
• Python SDK
• iPhone SDK
• Android SDK

Advanced APIs

• Facebook Query Language (FQL)
• Facebook Markup Language (FBML)
• Old REST API
• Old JavaScript Client Library