As the number of Maltese on the social networking platform Facebook continues to rise, Maltese software developers have started to exploit the recent opening up of the platform to third party software developers.
James Attard worked on a Facebook application that creates a polling system for the series of online podcasts Mu?ika mod ie?or by Toni Sant. Facebook users were invited to choose their favourite songs, albums, and singers that featured in the weekly series available at www.maltamedia.net/podcasts/.
The most polled for last year were Scream Daisy, Xtruppaw, The Characters and The Riffs.
The Facebook poll has been a welcome addition to the Mu?ika mod ie?or podcast series, which a couple of weeks ago released the 100th edition.
It all began when Mr Sant told Mr Attard that the online poll solution used in previous years could not rule out completely multiple votes from the same user and therefore a more reliable solution was needed.
"Since participating in Facebook applications requires the user to have a valid account with a valid identity, he (Mr Sant) asked me to find a good web poll application on Facebook which was easily amendable for his needs, i.e. a user could vote for any or all of five categories, which included not less than 20 entries each. Such application didn't exist in Facebook, so I opted to create one myself, even for the fun of the challenge," Mr Attard explained.
The application was designed in PHP5 and MySQL and the web poll was ready in an hour.
"However, interfacing it with the Facebook platform by using Facebook's APIs was a big challenge," admits the young developer. "This is due to the fact that the APIs continually change and most of the documentation I found online was outdated, so I ended up reverse engineering the new APIs to get things work."
He said he felt quite surprised that in a couple of weeks there were around 200 users who installed his application in their profile.
"Despite that my application runs on a very old Linux-powered laptop which I had bought for €70 (Lm30) and a modest internet connection, the application was always available to these users. I am also quite happy that people who installed this application have written positive comments in the fora. This instils in me aptitude to write new applications. Indeed I have a couple of them in the pipeline.
"I think Facebook gained so much popularity in web application development that it is a good opportunity for us technologists and developers to put our ideas on this platform. There some folks who make money out of these applications designed on Facebook."
Mr Attard uses Facebook to share games, trivia, and what he calls 'silly' applications with all of his friends, or maybe to check out new updates and feeds from his favourite networks and meet friends he had not seen for ages.
http://www.facebook.com
James Attard worked on a Facebook application that creates a polling system for the series of online podcasts Mu?ika mod ie?or by Toni Sant. Facebook users were invited to choose their favourite songs, albums, and singers that featured in the weekly series available at www.maltamedia.net/podcasts/.
The most polled for last year were Scream Daisy, Xtruppaw, The Characters and The Riffs.
The Facebook poll has been a welcome addition to the Mu?ika mod ie?or podcast series, which a couple of weeks ago released the 100th edition.
It all began when Mr Sant told Mr Attard that the online poll solution used in previous years could not rule out completely multiple votes from the same user and therefore a more reliable solution was needed.
"Since participating in Facebook applications requires the user to have a valid account with a valid identity, he (Mr Sant) asked me to find a good web poll application on Facebook which was easily amendable for his needs, i.e. a user could vote for any or all of five categories, which included not less than 20 entries each. Such application didn't exist in Facebook, so I opted to create one myself, even for the fun of the challenge," Mr Attard explained.
The application was designed in PHP5 and MySQL and the web poll was ready in an hour.
"However, interfacing it with the Facebook platform by using Facebook's APIs was a big challenge," admits the young developer. "This is due to the fact that the APIs continually change and most of the documentation I found online was outdated, so I ended up reverse engineering the new APIs to get things work."
He said he felt quite surprised that in a couple of weeks there were around 200 users who installed his application in their profile.
"Despite that my application runs on a very old Linux-powered laptop which I had bought for €70 (Lm30) and a modest internet connection, the application was always available to these users. I am also quite happy that people who installed this application have written positive comments in the fora. This instils in me aptitude to write new applications. Indeed I have a couple of them in the pipeline.
"I think Facebook gained so much popularity in web application development that it is a good opportunity for us technologists and developers to put our ideas on this platform. There some folks who make money out of these applications designed on Facebook."
Mr Attard uses Facebook to share games, trivia, and what he calls 'silly' applications with all of his friends, or maybe to check out new updates and feeds from his favourite networks and meet friends he had not seen for ages.
http://www.facebook.com