In today’s social-networking world Facebook is one of the unquestioning leaders. It gives unique opportunities to its users and is both a place to meet friends and a profitable advertising space.

Facebook applications and Facebook Connect are relatively new ways proposed by Facebook to drive traffic and customers. Currently they attract much attention of website and business owners who consider utilizing them as a part of an overall marketing strategy.

If you decide to develop a Facebook application or use advanced options of Facebook Connect, you need a professional development team that can implement that task in the most effective way. Here are a few tips which can be useful when selecting a Facebook app provider.

Choosing a team of Facebook application developers

1). Try to find experienced social network programmers rather than usual website developers. That means that the most appropriate candidate should have both technical understanding and deep people comprehension. Why? Because to develop a Facebook app is only half of the battle, the main point is to make it so that people like it and want to use it. In other words, your development team should understand key marketing principles of Facebook and think over every feature to drive users to your application.

2). Assure that the team is able to develop not only a cool functionality but also make an application user-friendly. A handy and stylish interface is crucial for your Facebook application success.

3). Make sure the provider is aware of Facebook Privacy Policy (facebook.com/privacy/explanation.php?ref=pf), Facebook Developer Principles and Policies (developers.facebook.com/policy/), and upcoming changes described in Facebook Developers Roadmap (wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Developer_Roadmap). These documents contain lists of limitations that should be taken into account while developing Facebook apps. If your application does not comply with them, it won’t be permitted on Facebook.

4). Check that they have relevant experience in source code design and refactoring techniques. That helps to keep the application responsive to Facebook API (Application Programming Interface) changes with minimal effort. Keeping the source code in a good shape and with proper comments is a key to smooth maintenance for the application lifetime.

5). Every time Facebook gets a shiny new feature or enhances Facebook API the programmers should be able to reflect that in your application. Long-term relationship with your development team is one of the best solutions for that task.

Facebook applications and Facebook Connect are increasingly becoming must-have marketing and social-networking tools. A good development team can help you to avoid typical mistakes and get the most of Facebook opportunities.

About the Author
Dmitriy Kharchenko is the CEO of Acceptic Ltd, a software development company, Ukraine. Among other services, Acceptic provides Facebook Connect integration and Facebook application development – FB apps that win a lot of fans.

Autoload is a new feature introduced in PHP5 that you don’t have to explicitly require or include a PHP script file that contains the class being used any more but it will be automatically loaded or included when needed. For example, with PHP4 you would have to write something like this:

require_once("foo.php"); // foo.php contains the class Foo

myFoo = new Foo();

Every time you need to create an instance of some class you have to include the particular PHP file that contains that class. It is not just extra work but also make it more error-prone. It can be a challenge to manage the whole lot of include or require lines as well. That’s where the autoload feature of PHP5 kicks in. Instead of including a particular PHP script every time we need it, we create a very simple function at the beginning of the current file so that PHP automatically knows what file to include when we need a particular class. For example:

function __autoload($class_name) {

require_once 'classes/'. $class_name. '.php';}

$obj1 = new MyClass1(); // PHP automatically requires 'classes/MyClass1.php'

$obj2 = new MyClass2(); // PHP automatically requires 'classes/MyClass1.php'

As illustrated by the example above, with the simple function highlighted in bold, you will never have to explicitly include any PHP scripts again. Instead, you will specify the place to look for the corresponding script file to include and PHP will do the task for you. In this example, the name of the class “MyClass1″ is passed to the function __autoload as variable $class_name and in the body of the function, it specifies the location of the exact PHP file to include, namely, in the ‘classes’ directory and the name of the file is the same as that of the class, $class_name. ‘.php’.

Usually, the __autoload function should be placed in a site wide configuration file which is included at the beginning of all PHP files of your website so it will only be written once. This way, all the classes of your website or application can be better named and organized.

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In the current scenario of web development, as the time goes, competition is becoming heavier. To cop with this situation, a lot of web development companies are moving towards medium through which they can make stand in competition. Varieties of scripting languages are available in the market for quicker and safer web development. PHP is one of them.

Among such scripting languages, PHP is more preferred than others. The main reason behind this is the easy availability. It is an open source and anyone can utilize it as per development requirements. Basically PHP web development is about making a user friendly website for a certain audience – internet users. It is a process that contains various steps, such as:

• Web design
• Content creation
• Server side scripting
• Client side scripting
• Server and network configuration
• Website testing and analysis

All these steps are performed by professional PHP web developers. According to web site development requirements, they create a website with simple static pages to multiple dynamic pages. Now for this, a scripting language is used as a front end. PHP is the most famous language nowadays as it is an open source and requires no costs in implementation. Over the years PHP development has been continuously updated which has made PHP highly interactive and allows creating applications and websites which have been used at a mass scale in today’s technological world.

PHP stands for Hypertext Pre-processor. It is mainly used for developing dynamic web pages – dynamic websites. PHP development can be defined as Pre Hypertext Processor whose scripts are embedded in the web page, & can be read on the servers prior to sending to the requested page.

There are a big number of advantages if you use PHP for web development. Some of the advantages are:

• Low development and maintenance cost
• High performance and reliability
• Ability to embed itself into the HTML code
• Compatible with servers like Apache and IIS
• Runs on various platforms such as Windows, Linux and Unix
• Supports a wide variety of databases such as MySQL, Informix, Oracle, Sybase, Solid, PostgreSQL and Generic ODBC

So finally we can summarize PHP as contemptible, secure, fast and reliable option for your web site development. Even though PHP can be used as a command line language, its primary usage and acceptance is as a web site development language.

This article is courtesy of Jack Hard – an executive at Web Software Outsourcing is one of the most reputable outsourcing web development company. Web Software Outsourcing Company provides PHP web development services and web design services at cost effective rates. Visit us at: http://www.websoftwareoutsourcing.com/phpdevelopment.shtml or send your entire PHP web development requirements at: info@websoftwareoutsourcing.com