People Rock

Really awesome to work with my FB app teammates. They are really great great great people! Fast learner, elite programmer, dedicated executor , warm-hearted contributor. The app is around the corner, we are going to publish it in a few days. Though there're still many problems remaining to be solved, I really feel some sense of achievement. My teammates really rock. Even with no web programming base at the beginning, we picked them one by one at a very short time. Even though I am the slowest learner in the team, I also have self studied HTML&CSS(Wrox HTML5 24 hour  trainer), PHP(O' Reilly Head First PHP&MySQL), Facebook Graph API(plus many previous FB Apis), a little bit of JavaScript,MySQL,J_Query, J_Son from W3schools,Google and many online resources. Our app consists of four pages, two of them are very important pages. I help develop one of the important pages. It should not be hard, but really takes me quite a lot of time for me to make something. It takes some time to understand how data are transmitted among the client side and the server side. There are a lot of things to concern about. For instance,it is generally good to use PHP for data transmission from the server, but since PHP can only run in a server, keeping on posting&getting from the server and the client will make too many function calls and consume too much time. It would be good to use JavaScript to help fetching the data from cookies to make less function calls with the server, but that is less secure.  We've got to make trade offs. It might be intuitive to use HTML form to post data to PHP, but it may not be a good idea if the data needs to be handled several times and the UI designer needs to make some J_Query animation functions with blocks of these data. Ajax is also a quite big challenge. I am not very sure about these terms, but I really learned a lot along the way. My teammates are really clever. The database is developed within one day by Mingzhe and Yingbo has written a lot of PHP functions but rewrote them using JavaScript. Xiangyun has made a great contribution to the team and he is really an elite in any aspects, no matter it is UI , web programming or hardware programming. It's great to work with these great people, I really appreciate and honor them. Comparing with them, I am much normal and ordinary. Though we all didn't have a strong web programming experience, they really learned much faster than me. Though I have edited some great features in my page,like autocomplete, datetime picker using J_Query, the codes are mostly modified from various sources. I didn't code as that much. So far, I am still not very familiar with JavaScript and many other languages, Try to catch up lah, haha~~ I have encountered many challenges as well. For instance, I want to get the friend list of one of my friends however facebook didn't allow me to access these data. As I know from the developer site, FB only allows access token for users to access his/her friends information, but doesn't allow apps to do so. The Graph API does not support useful functionality appeared in some old facebook apis as well. I seem that can only know the mutual friends between two ids using a previous api method if I do not have either of the two people's authorization. Don't know why, but facebook is deprecating most of its old apis...

Next week, more on UI and creative stuffs. May invite some UI designers to help make some pictures and get some feedbacks from the users once it starts officially testing and operating. Good Night.