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I've searched on google and have taken a look at the facebook site for the apis, but facebook does not have an official SDK for python. I looked at the third party api for python listed on their site that could be used to communicate with facebook. After having visited their official site and github repository there is a small readme file that shows basic usage, it seems to assume that you are already connected to facebook, and the example at the end of that page shows a cookie example.

The short examples seem easy enough but there is no explaination of anything and i dont find any more documentation about anything else.. there does not seem to be any information about all available methods you can use with the api..where do the people who are using this api get the documentation to find the methods available so they are able to do work with this ?

Since i guess people are pretty tired of signing up for yet another service i would like to offer to sign in with their facebook and twitter accounts (although thats a no no for the ad people who would like to have access to the user profile in order to have targeted words/links that generate revenue). Im using django and have taken a look at the django-facebook api as well but the documentation seems to just point to the github repository which doesnt have any documenation, almost just like the other api pointed out above. Basically i dont find any documenation about how to use the apis except from the small examples.

And like always, i appericiate your time answering this, always nice to add an explaination to any code so the answer is a little more usefull, thanks.

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My info might be a little bit out of date as I was working at a startup implementing a Python backend on Google AppEngine that interfaced with Facebook, used FQL, AppEngine datastore etc, about a year and half ago.

There are several third party APIs you can use, for instance, https://github.com/jgorset/facepy or https://github.com/pythonforfacebook/facebook-sdk. The reason there is no 'documentation' on the github site is because it implements access to the API that IS documented on Facebook's developer pages https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/.

But that is in a perfect world. My experience with the Facebook APIs is that they don't always do what is said on the dev pages. You don't get consistent return data, FB Realtime API not/inconsistently notifying for certain connections (music, movies, books, tv). Unfortunately, I think they have many non-documented APIs that are only available to the big app players.

Where I got my real world working info and learned how to access Facebook using Python was right here on stack overflow.

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  • Hmm, ok, so you mean that the methods in that api is also implemented in the facepy api..then ill read the official api pages.. –  Dec 05 '13 at 16:16
  • Yeah that is the gist of it. As there is no 'official' python SDK from Facebook, it sometimes requires a lot of source reading if the one you choose (facepy or facebook-sdk) doesn't work. Quite annoying sometimes, but you will learn a lot. – William Denman Dec 05 '13 at 16:37