Ari Steinberg and Charlie Cheever of Facebook gave a fascinating talk about the design of the Facebook platform when they spoke on Tuesday to the SDForum Web Services SIG. As might be expected, the presentation drew a large audience including renowned Facebook fanboy Dave Maclure.
The Facebook platform allows outside developers to build applications and offer them to Facebook users. These applications can reach into Facebook data to do their work so security and privacy concerns are paramount. Also with Facebook approaching 50 million users and reportedly 85,000 applications, performance and scaling are big concerns.
Ari spoke first on the Facebook API. After looking at other Web 2.0 APIs and finding them wanting, they decided to use a query language approach which would give applications much greater flexibility and at the same time have the possibility of being more efficient by only fetching data that is needed. The language, FBQL is basically a simplified and restricted version of SQL.
The linguistic approach is also used in Facebook Markup Language (FBML) the language that applications and users use to define and customize their pages. As Charlie told us, it is much easier to validate and sanitize markup and style sheets from a parse tree than with regular expressions or any other technique. Also the result is much less likely to have the security loopholes that seem to plague so many Web 2.0 sites.
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