Facebook development must be rapid and follow Facebook's standards. It presents different challenges than regular web develoment.

Web developers are accustomed to norms like sessions, get and post methods, redirects, and standard HTML. We use our own database and web servers to host all of our code. We control tightly integrated components for our development.

Getting started in Facebook development has a steep learning curve and the limitations imposed by the Facebook platform throw many web norms out the window. Development is awkward and debugging is challenging. Instead of spending their time on building applications, developers must spend time working around these limitations and debugging Facebook nuances.

FBFramework is a lightweight toolset for Facebook development built on top of Zend Framework. The FBFramework toolset abstracts FBML so it behaves like standard HTML, even in development sandboxes. It provides an ActiveRecord model for interacting with the application database and Facebook's FQL tables. It provides methods for posting forms and redirecting users so development can follow traditional web workflows.

My session at ZendCon 2008 will explore the challenges and pitfalls of Facebook development and how tools like FBFramework can simplify and expedite application development.