Photo by Coccinelle69

In the last post I talked about the mechanics of how an app communicates with Facebook. With the alpha release of Ringside, there’s now an example of how to implement the server side of Facebook. It’s open-source and the two most interesting parts are their underlying mysql database and the PHP interface code that implements the API on top of that. Using mysql makes it hard to scale to massive numbers of users, so it’s not ready to power Facebook yet. On the other hand, having enough users to strain a single database server is a good problem to have. At that point you should have the resources to reimplement something more advanced under the hood.

Having a reference host for any plugin architecture is immensely helpful, especially one that’s open source. For example, if I was having trouble with the details of fetching events, I could open up ringside/api/includes/ringside/api/facebook/EventsGet.php and inspect exactly what their implementation is. There’s no guarantee that it’s the same as Facebook’s code, but it’s at least an unambiguous and exact specification of what somebody else thinks it should be doing. To get your own copy of the source using SVN, run
svn co https://ringside.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ringside ringside

The other exciting part of Ringside’s release is their mysql schema. It could become a defacto standard for expressing the data that underlies all social networks. Anybody who’s able to take their own data source and translate it into the same tables can plug that into Ringside’s system. Turn the key, and you’ve got your own private Facebook. The schema is at ringside/api/config/ringside-schema.sql

If you want to customize it, the API source is full of great examples of how to work with the database to extend its capabilities, though the LGPL licence might require your changes to also be published.