Best Approach to write a FaceBook application for Android

Question

BackGround:

1. There are Facebook APIs(and SDKs) available to develop applications for other Mobile devices like iPhone, BlackBerry etc, but it seems there are no official ones for Android(?).

2. People have ported Java APIs to work on Android and have written FaceBook Client applications(FaceBook dev: Wiki Page). Apparently, there is also a light weight FaceBook SDK in alpha release for Android(a la FBRocket). But it is not avised to be used in Production.

3. Since these FaceBook functionalities have been exposed as REST based service, most of work would invove sending requests in desired format over Http. So, writing a FaceBook client app for Android certainly is doable.There are similar applications already in market e.g.: Bloo.

Questions:

1. When asked to write a FaceBook client application what approach should one undertake? Should we choose the SDK or invoke the services over Http?

2. If there is already a Web application that integrates with FaceBook, can we just browse to that Application from inside a WebView and be done with this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

1. I would use the Java APIs. You mention they were "ported" but were they? You develop Android apps in Java, you can often just include .jar files and use them in your Android app without any sort of "porting". REST access to FaceBook would also work fine too.

2. Are you talking about a custom application that you've built on top of FaceBook? If you already have a webapp that works fine in the Android browser then it would be fine to just have your users go to that site by giving them the URL. If the WebApp is only part of your application then you could pop open the browser with that page open, or you could load that page in a WebView as part of your larger application. However if this is all your application is doing, then it's not really an application, it's just a glorified browser bookmark and I would strongly recommend against releasing an app like that to the Android Market unless you like getting horrible ratings.