RPXnow Facebook Connect - Use and Level of support?

Question

I am using RPXnow.com authentication solution for a rails app and am now at the point of wanting to develop Facebook integration features using Facebook Connect and the client api. What I am unclear on from RPXnow docs is the level of integration their solution provides. When a user connects via rpx using their FB creds, are they now using Facebook Connect? Can I make calls to the client api from my app? Do I need to use the RPX api to access the FB client APIs?

Anyone with experience using both who can shed light here, much appreciated.

Answer 1

dnewman,

Great question. Facebook Connect is simply a javascript layer built on top of the Facebook Platform APIs. RPX uses the platform APIs to authenticate the user, and after they have signed in, you may safely use the native Facebook Connect javascript to implement FB specific features on your site like posting activity back to the News Feed. You just need to set your connect URL on the facebook developer site and drop in the Facebook Connect javascript and then start implementing. After authenticating via RPX, the user will already have approved and "connected" to your website, and you'll have access to the breadth of Connect directly.

Also, if you have an RPX Plus/Pro account you can make simple RPX API calls to set a user's status and post activity on Facebook (and Twitter/MySpace).

Brian Ellin RPX Product Manager

Answer 2

Once you've hooked up RPXNow (JanRain) single sign-on, you can follow the Facebook documentation. The Server-side Personalization example is in PHP but the idea is the same in any language.

// Fetch the user's friends                                                   
$friends = json_decode(file_get_contents(
    'https://graph.facebook.com/me/friends?access_token=' .
    $cookie['oauth_access_token']), true);
$friend_ids = array_keys($friends);

The key point to note is that the $cookie['oauth_access_token'] referenced in this example needs to be the string returned by the RPXNow sign-on API response in the JSON field ['accessCredentials']['accessToken']

Hint: from your RPXNow dashboard, check out the Test Sign-In Widget page under Resources to see where that token is in the response.

Initially I thought this would be hampered by having your Base Domain set to rpxnow.com in your Facebook Application settings, but this is not the case. It works fine.