Developing and Testing a Facebook application

Question

Typically I develop my websites on trunk, then merge changes to a testing branch where they are put on a 'beta' website, and then finally they are merged onto a live branch and put onto the live website.

With a Facebook application things are a bit tricky. As you can't view a Facebook application through a normal web browser (it has to go through the Facebook servers) you can't easily give each developer their own version of the website to work with and test.

I have not come across anything about the best way to develop and test a Facebook application while continuing to have a stable live website that users can use. My question is this, what is the best practice for organising the development and testing of a Facebook application?

Answer 1

Try updating your hosts file (for windows users @ c:\windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts) with an entry that will route all requests from your live domain back to your machine.

So 127.0.0.1 mywebappthatusesfacebook.com.

Then make sure that your app is running at the root of your webserver. @ http://localhost/ Then goto mywebappthatusesfacebook.com in your browser and it should redirect right back to your local machine. Facebook won't know the difference. Hope this helps

Answer 2

The way I and my partner did it was we each made our own private Facebook applications, that pointed to our IP address where we worked on it. Since we worked in the same place, we each picked a different port, and had our router forward that port to our local IP address. It was kinda slow to refresh a page, but it worked very nicely.