TommyRay Web Productions

Education and knowledge sometimes does not come cheap by any means, and when you're striving for the more cutting edge or the most sought after coding, your time can be quickly spendt on figuring out something which has not yet been fully documented or documented properly. Or, perhaps, if you are as lucky as I just happen to be, you'll go through two days of work to hit a wall that is out of your control and makes everything you've done prior to that basically useless. At least until "they" fix it. That "bug" that went unmentioned until you need to figure out why you are getting the error you are getting. I can remember how the PHP parsing problem I ran into with IE9 doing some HTML5 code was pretty much the same in wasted hours trying this, that and the other thing. Although some will say the hours were not wasted and that in the process something had to be learned, I still say it is wasted time as life is too short and the real programmers who get paid for such things should have had it taken care of already.

And so went my initial venture of trying to get a working integrated Facebook Application written in PHP to work. When setting things up there was an option to host your Facebook Application in the cloud on a service called "Heroku". I thought; "Great! It's all integrated nicely through Facebook!". And it was. I had no problem setting things up for a Website but when it came time to make it into an actual App I ran into a problem. Actually two problems. When I finally found it, why, it basically said that; "...There is a bug with Heroku and Facebook concerning this issue. Keep an eye on this page for an update." And that was several months ago. Here's the rub, and I know you are all wondering this; Why didn't they mention this at the start??!

Screenshot of Facebook-Heroku Error:

Well, I sure wish they did. There was no mention that you would get an error for invalid authentication, but there it was. The token was having problems being passed through. So I researched and looked and finally found a possible workaround. A few other options later, and I DID have my app working JUST like an app should within Facebook!! BUT the URL I had to use was NOT the right URL needed to actually fully work as a FB App. It was the Heroku cloud hosting address, and that would not do.

Needless to say I had to finally throw in the towel much to my chagrin and come back to it later or look to another route for handling my creative pursuit.

Others have run into this very problem, such as Cobnetcom. The problems begin starting last October 2011 or so when Facebook REQUIRES you to have a secure server with whcih to serve your apps. (Or an https:// address) This costs money, of course, and not every coder can afford such a service. That is why Heroku is so useful as it allows for an SSL address to be serving up your application. Facebook now offers the use of Heroku during the creation of a new App, in fact, so it seemed to me like that was the sweetest deal. Until I ran into... the bug.

I had two alternatives left to me for options at this point;

1. Wait for the issue to be resolved with Heroku and Facebook
2. Obtain access to a secure server.

Whatever solution arrives first, you will be notified of this here as I plan to keep updating this until there is some mode of success in dealing with the problem at hand. Who knows, I may even solve it on my own some time. Actually, I resolved the "States do not match..." error, but the app still wont display inside of Facebook proper. But I DID get it working through an external URL. Enough to excite but not enough to tempt me into wasting more time until the developers involved actually sit down and fix this thing. My advice is to WAIT if considering the Heroku option for hosting a Facebook App.