Facebook Announces FBJS2

developers.facebook.com

7 points·peter123··6 comments

I've never written a FB app but aside from getting some of facebook's canned ui components, why would one use FBML and FBJS?

It seems better to just run your whole app in an iframe and just use html/css/jquery and have complete control while hitting the REST api yourself.

Here's a good explanation:

http://www.ccheever.com/blog/?p=10

FBML allows you to do specific Facebook-only features easily, like friend requests and searching for your friends. It also has documentation and tutorials, which is not trivial when making the FBML/iframe decision.

Why did they create fbjs in the first place? It gave js development in fbml an unnecessary learning curve. Other companies had already mastered the js sandbox by then so there was no reason for these js wrappers.

because Facebook is stupid and is building a walled garden?

A decent helping of NIH syndrome probably had something to do with it. Facebook engineers are pretty decent, and they like doing things in-house if at all possible.

The only other example of a JS sandbox that works that I know of is Caja and Caja hadn't been publicly announced or released when FBJS originally launched.

In general, its pretty useful to be able to sandbox JS on a page so you can allow 3rd parties to do scripting on your page without putting their stuff inside iframes.

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