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Comment by briandoll | Hacker News Reader

This is pure win. The screencast on this post shows that with one click you get a deployed app (in the language you choose) that ships with an app template that uses the Facebook APIs to get you started.

We're witnessing a Facebook app that creates real living Facebook apps. Heroku continues to impress with insanely easy onboarding of folks new to deploying web apps, and building features the way things should work.

It must be amazing to start programming in the age of Heroku.

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The fact that the boilerplate app includes working examples of using the various Facebook APIs is the icing on the cake, as far as I'm concerned. I wrote a couple of apps back in the relatively early days of the API, and I remember being very frustrated by the state of the documentation and the lack of useful examples[1], and something like this would have saved me an absurd amount of time.

1: It's been a few years since I last had to do this, so the situation might have improved since then.

The graph API did improve the situation a lot, but when I worked with it last December (creating albums, posting photos) I did encounter a gap or two in the documentation. OAuth2 is definitely simpler than the old home-grown authentication system, which I never used because it looks insecure: They sign a string formed by concatenating name/value pairs without a delimiter between pairs.

It hasn't. You have to have a lot of knowhow to get these things working reliably. I'm extremely impressed with this effort.

Actually, that’s the thing – if you are starting now it’s not amazing, it’s normal. :)

It’s amazing to us fogies.

Exactly. Having started building webapps (when there just called CGI) in 1996 and seen all of the app servers and platforms come and go, there has never been a better time than now to be a web developer, thanks to products like Heroku, New Relic, SauceLabs, CloudBees, etc.. I'm constantly blown away by the improvements in developer efficiently being made seemingly every day right now. This is why you are seeing a ton of startups (even the well funded ones) only hiring a small focused technical team. What is rather funny is watching how fragmented the mobile development space has become, with some exceptions (PhoneGap, SpacePort, Mobify, etc.), especially considering that is where people are moving so rapidly to do their computing. But I'm no mobile expert so my perception is probably skewed.

Agreed. The barriers to start developing a web app now are incredibly low. You've got a server backend in Heroku, wand Facebook's gazillions of users right out of the gate.

It's certainly a win for both companies involved. I've thought about using Heroku, and making a Facebook app, and the 2 of them together now makes it a lot more likely that both will happen.

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